This paper was presented as the Mundell-Fleming Lecture at the Tenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference at the International Monetary Fund in Washington held November 5–6, 2009.There are striking and terrifying similarities between the sudden failure of a heart and that of a financial system. In the medical literature, the former is referred to as sudden cardiac arrest. By analogy, I refer to its financial counterpart as a sudden financial arrest. In this article I describe the latter and its treatment guided by its medical counterpart
