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...

This paper was presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's Symposium on Monetary Policy and Uncertainty: Adapting to a Changing Economy at Jackson Hole, Wyoming on 28-30 August 2003. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the BIS

This paper studies the interaction between monetary policy and macroeconomic stability in a model with two distinguishing features. First, financing - cash flows - underpins all economic activity, with banks generating deposits by granting loans. Money is non-neutral as the policy interest rate...

Every financial crisis brings in its wake demands for more information; the latest one is no exception. Because, in deceptively tranquil times, it is well-nigh impossible to foster the consensus necessary to improve data availability, such a window of opportunity must not be missed. To be sure,...

We compare and contrast two prominent notions of financial cycles: a domestic variant, which focuses on how financial conditions within individual economies lead to boom-bust cycles there; and a global variant, which highlights how global financial conditions affect individual economies. The two...

A frequently neglected aspect of financial booms and busts - financial cycles - is their impact on fiscal positions. And yet, the latest financial crisis and history show that these cycles can wreak havoc with public finances. After reviewing the impact of financial cycles on fiscal positions,...

What are liquidity crises? And what can be done to address them? This short paper brings together some personal reflections on this issue, largely based on previous work. In the process, it questions a number of commonly held beliefs that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The paper is...

We use a unique cross-country dataset at the loss event level to document the evolution and characteristics of banks' operational risk. After a spike following the great financial crisis, operational losses have declined in recent years. The spike is largely accounted for by losses due to...

Using a Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) identified with a mix of sign and zero restrictions, we show that a restrictive bank loan supply shock has a strong and persistent negative impact on real GDP and the GDP deflator. This result comes about even though flows of other sources of...

Research on interbank networks and systemic importance is starting to recognise that the web of exposures linking banks' balance sheets is more complex than the single-layer-of-exposure approach suggests. We use data on exposures between large European banks, broken down by both maturity and...