Any direct spillover effect from the eurozone's "banking and sovereign debt" crisis is likely only to hit UK and US banks, according to a working paper published by the International Monetary Fund today.

The paper – Risk Exposures and Financial Spillovers in Tranquil and Crisis Times: Bank-Level Evidence, by Hélène Poirson and Jochen Schmittmann – finds that German and French banks mostly transmit and receive shocks to other European banks, particularly to the UK, while outside Europe shocks are