No one in the industrial countries should now question the substantial economic benefits associated with reducing inflation from earlier, high levels. At the same time, history also teaches that the stability of consumer prices might not be sufficient to ensure macroeconomic stability. Past...

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,...

Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilizing for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may trigger severe recessions. Policy responses were more complex for developed economies with very low interest rates after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We document, however,...

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,...

This paper examines whether the rescue measures adopted during the global financial crisis helped to sustain the supply of bank lending. The analysis proposes a setup that allows testing for structural shifts in the bank lending equation, and employs a novel dataset covering large international...

Do macroprudential regulations on residential lending influence commercial lending behavior too? To answer this question, we identify the compositional changes in banks' supply of credit using the variation in their holdings of residential mortgages on which extra capital requirements were...

The successful pursuit of the objective of low inflation by central banks in recent decades has also delivered low variability of both inflation and output. At the same time, numerous financial and other imbalances (defined here as significant and sustained deviations from historical norms) have...

This paper questions the appropriateness of popular analytical frameworks that focus on current accounts or net capital flows as a basis for assessing the pattern of cross-border capital flows, the degree of financial integration and the vulnerability of countries to financial crises. In the...

The pre-crisis period was characterised by ample liquidity, a credit boom, and low yields in a wide range of asset classes. It was also defined by the accumulation of risks on and off the balance sheets of many financial intermediaries, particularly banks, as well as by a substantial increase in...

A popular strategy for estimating output gaps is to anchor them to structural economic relationships. The resulting output gaps, however, are often highly sensitive to numerous auxiliary assumptions inherent in the approach. This complicates their use in policymaking. We illustrate the point...