With the financial crises ongoing in Greece and Venezuela, sovereign debt crises have become more and more prominent in the public eye. Thus, it has become important to be able to predict when nations will enter such debt crises. We collected publicly available data in order to train models to predict, given a nation’s economic status in one year, whether they would be in a debt crisis the next...

29 2 Two points of view on whether Basel II—a set of guidelines on how much capital banks should hold to guard against current and future risks—adds to boom-bust cycles T he current financial market turmoil—which began in the U.S. subprime mortgage market in summer 2007 and quickly spread to europe—has exposed glaring weaknesses in how financial institutions are supervised and regulated. As a r...