The global financial crisis has shaken the foundations of the deceptively comfortable pre-crisis central banking world. Central banks face a threefold challenge: economic, intellectual and institutional. This essay puts forward a compass to help central banks sail in the largely uncharted waters...

The recent financial crisis has triggered a major rethink of analytical approaches and policy towards financial stability. The crisis has encouraged a sharper focus on systemic risk, the inclusion of a financial sector in macroeconomic models, a shift from a microprudential to a macroprudential...

Financial cycle booms can end in crises and, even if they do not, they tend to weaken growth. Given their slow build-up, do they convey information about recession risk? We compare the predictive performance of different financial cycle proxies with that of the term spread - a popular recession...