At the height of the European sovereign debt crisis, the European Central Bank decided to purchase distressed European government bonds. Even worse, and more importantly, the ECB is providing direct support of several hundred billions of euros to troubled banks via its normal monetary policy...

A non-linear model is applied where suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the exchange rate go beyond a zone of inaction. We call the latter a "play" area-analogous to mechanical play and implement an algorithm describing path-dependent play-hysteresis into a regression...