This paper analyzes Germany’s fiscal policy position. Half of GDP passes through the hands of government, a high debt to GDP ratio limits the maneuvering, and the revenue sharing mechanism prevents a competitive federalism. Most importantly for the future, the federal finance minister has to...

The Eurosystem has been pursuing a crisis management policy for more than four years now. This policy aims primarily at maintaining financial stability in the euro area by providing vast liquidity support to commercial banks that are operating in nationally segmented banking systems. As a side...

The authors pick up the standard textbook approach of money creation and develop a simple agent-based alternative. They show that their model is well suited to explain the endogenous creation of money. Although more general, their model still contains the standard results as a limiting case. The...

In this paper the authors focus on credit connections as a potential source of systemic risk. In particular, they seek to answer the following question: how do we find densely connected subsets of nodes within a credit network? The question is relevant for policy, since these subsets are likely...

The recent financial crises pointed out the central role of public and private debt in modern economies. However, even if debt is a recurring topic in discussions about the current economic situation, economic modelling does not take into account debt as one of the crucial determinants of...

Current macro-models based on the demand-side effects of monetary policy and sticky prices account for the observed correlations between policy interest rates, output and inflation, but they fail with regard to other empirical regularities, such as the negative effects of policy shocks on real...

Credit relationships between commercial banks and quoted firms are studied for the structure and its temporal change from the year 1980 to 2005. At each year, the credit network is regarded as a weighted bipartite graph where edges correspond to the relationships and weights refer to the amounts...

Use of a promise to pay by a bank to insure an outstanding loan in order to return the value of the insured amount into capital for use in writing a new loan is an invention in banking with calculably greater potential economic impact than the original invention of reserve banking. The...

Die Potentialorientierung der Geldpolitik setzt voraus, daß der Geldmengenmultiplikator und die Umlaufgeschwindigkeit des Geldes hinreichend stabil sind. Vielfach wird behauptet, dies sei insbesondere seit der deutschdeutschen Währungsunion nicht mehr gegeben. Der These wird in einer...

The complexity of credit money is seen as the central issue in the banking-macro nexus, which the author considers as a structural as well as a process component of the evolving economy. This nexus is significant for the stability/fragility of the economic system because it links the monetary...