It is often suggested that what is called the subprime crisis was the result of lax monetary policies that led to excess liquidity in financial markets. But there is an obvious paradox here, because how can an excess of liquidity result ultimately in a shortage of liquidity that has to be made up by central banks?

The IMF would have to be able to issue additional SDRs in periods of shortage, as when the Fed provided dollar swaps to ensure adequate dollar liquidity in the second half of 2008. At the moment, countries holding 85 of IMF voting power must agree before SDRs can be issued, which is no recipe for liquidity.

Last September, however, financial conditions changed suddenly in Hong Kong. The liquidity shortage caused by the European sovereign debt crisis led developed countries banks especially European banks with exposure in Hong Kong to withdraw their funds, taking dollars with them.

If you believe that the crisis was caused by a shortage of liquidity, we had plenty of models analyzing liquidity shortages and their effects on financial institutions. If you believe that the blame lies with greedy bankers and unthinking investors, lulled by the promise of a government bailout, or with a market driven crazy by irrational exuberance, we had studied all this too, in great detail.

Pollution, energy shortage, environmental diversity, poverty.

There was a shortage of fuel.

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But we have a major shortage of organs.

There is a shortage of good building wood.

What determines a liquidity crisis?

And 40 states already have an acute nursing shortage.

Huge shortage of organs, God forbid, if you need one.

The breakdown was fundamentally a liquidity crisis, and liquidity was easily restored in several ways the New York banks issued their own liquidity through a clearing house one massively powerful financial institution, J.P. Morgan, bought up collapsing shares, and thus reversed a market panic and a scramble for liquidity and European central banks supplied gold to the American market.

For SMEs, a shortage of customers, not a shortage of credit, constrained borrowing, employment, and output. And the customers were absent because the pre crisis credit boom had left them over leveraged.

He or she should not attempt to centralize information, but rather to make it flow more smoothly. Call it information liquidity, akin to financial liquidity.

That energy shortage in developing countries is a basic impediment to development.

A substantial barrier to broader access for women to participate in the development of physical fitness and sports is the shortage of specialists, equipment, gear and athletic facilities and the shortage of funding.

The recent shortage of coffee has given rise to a lot of problems.

Due to the water shortage, all the flowers in the garden have died.

The shortage of specialized personnel is obvious, and is concentrated in large centres.

The first has to do with the shortage in the number of experts.

While this important gesture will alleviate to some extent the shortage of accommodation for the armed forces, the overall shortage of accommodation remains a serious problem, which negatively affects the morale of the armed forces.

UNICEF met its internal liquidity guideline for the year 2004.

Shortage of demand for currently produced goods and services and mass unemployment no longer loom as the region s biggest macroeconomic problems. Flooding their economies with liquidity, maintaining export friendly exchange rates, and spending to employ workers directly and boost the supply of safe savings vehicles have made the Great Recession in East Asia less dire than it has been elsewhere.

There's actually a major health crisis today in terms of the shortage of organs.

Suddenly, as today, even big banks did not trust each other. The breakdown was fundamentally a liquidity crisis, and liquidity was easily restored in several ways the New York banks issued their own liquidity through a clearing house one massively powerful financial institution, J.P. Morgan, bought up collapsing shares, and thus reversed a market panic and a scramble for liquidity and European central banks supplied gold to the American market.

Other challenges facing our region include high levels of poverty and income inequality, a persistent food shortage and an emerging water shortage both due largely to drought and environmental degradation as well as to institutional, policy and resource constraints.

Meanwhile, the credit crunch in the eurozone periphery is intensifying thanks to the ECB long term cheap loans, banks there don t have a liquidity problem now, but they do have a massive capital shortage. Faced with the difficulty of meeting their 9 capital ratio requirement, they will achieve the target by selling assets and contracting credit not exactly an ideal scenario for economic recovery.

There is also a severe shortage of investment, both local and foreign, in many developing countries.

In rural areas of the country there is a shortage of trained and qualified female teachers.

Certainly we are suffering from a shortage of resolutions related, directly or indirectly, to nuclear disarmament.

Here, Mayhew concludes that new derivative markets clearly increase the liquidity and quality of information in existing financial markets. And it is this liquidity and quality of information that ultimately propels economic growth.

A prudent level of liquidity for UNDP regular resources would be the equivalent of expenditure for three to six months, implying a total liquidity between 200 million and 400 million at current expenditure levels.

One is that Frito Lay figured out this liquidity thing with their consumer.

So for the past few years, the coastal areas, they found themselves in a shortage of labor.

The food shortage could also jeopardize the return of refugees in places such as Afghanistan and Liberia.

The Committee notes with concern the shortage of access to safe drinking water in highly industrialized areas.

In the northern city of Korhogo, the supply reservoir is nearly dry, causing an acute water shortage.

Lowering volatility and sopping up excess liquidity can be beneficial, but there are risks here as well regulators can easily overshoot the mark, leaving financial markets with weakened capacity for price discovery and too little liquidity.

However, as the briefing indicated, the crucial issue of the shortage of expert capacity should be promptly addressed.

Sudan had so far been unable to implement its integrated programme, largely because of a shortage of funds.

The shortage of water in the Gaza Strip has increased its price to five times that in Israel.

HONG KONG When the US investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed five years ago, emerging market economies did not hold many of the toxic financial assets mainly American subprime mortgages that fueled the subsequent global financial crisis. But they were deeply affected by the drop in world trade, which recorded a peak to trough decline of at least 15 , with trade finance also contracting sharply, owing to a shortage of dollar liquidity.