This volume is the fruit of the labors of a study group of economists convened at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute in 2009 by the Institute’s Economics and Society Program. The group discussed the causes of the global economic crisis and its implications for the global economy and the economy of Israel.

This file offers the reader a double perspective: on the one hand, a professional economic analysis of the causes of the crisis and its effects worldwide and in Israel, and on the other hand, the feelings of decision-makers and senior economists in real time and their analysis of data that provided them with only a partial preliminary picture of the situation. The discussions that appear here have been preserved in their original form for the sake of anyone who, in the future, explores the response of economists to dramatic events in real time.