The Swiss National Bank (SNB) has announced it will refrain from profit distribution in 2022 owing to the accumulation of a huge financial loss. In this paper we examine key determinants of the SNB's loss and shed light on its implications to monetary policy pursuit. In particular, we show that...

In our model, cross-currency basis, which captures the deviations from covered interest rate parity (CIP), reflects the relative value of the scarcer currency (US dollar) as collateral in funding constraints. Our empirical evidence shows that measures of dollar shortage derived from ECB tenders,...

With bond yields at all-time lows after the Fed's quantitative easing drove real interest rates to the zero-bound and even briefly below it, investors have allocated ever more money to equities. Lacking alternatives, the stock market has grown flush from yield-hungry buyers. But now the mood is...

In this paper we investigate the price, volatility and micro-level effects of central bank swap lines during the 2020 pandemic. These policies lowered the ceiling on covered interest rate parity violations and reduced volatility following settlement of swap line auctions. We then combine...

Central-bank collateral policy governs the convertibility of assets into central-bank money provided directly by the central bank. Focusing on government bonds, we develop clean identification of variation in such convertibility by exploiting differential treatment of same-country government...

In this paper we empirically analyze the determinants of bank default risk (measured by the banks' CDS spreads) for European banks during the period 2008-2018. We examine the effect of (1) bank business model characteristics, (2) sovereign default risk and (3) ECB monetary policy. We disentangle...

In response to the economic crisis of 2008 and the debt crises of some Eurozone countries, central banks began expansionary monetary policies, which became a massive injection of resources through the purchase of assets known as Quantitative Easing. The European Central Bank (ECB) took a step...

In the evolution of money, the advent of cryptocurrencies would have been an inevitable and a natural phenomenon, but the farfetched implications of the 2008 global credit mayhem only accelerated their arrival. Facebook's claim of the Libra Blockchain as a decentralized network is far from...

This paper relates Keynes's discussions of money, the state theory of money, financial markets, investors' expectations, uncertainty, and liquidity preference to the dynamics of government bond yields for countries with monetary sovereignty. Keynes argued that the central bank can influence the...

This paper analyses the issue of the dynamics of the TARGET2 system balances during the sovereign debt crisis, when some countries registered a decisive inflow of the central bank liquidity and others showed an outflow. The dynamics in the TARGET2 are here explained as being due to a fall in the...