In a contribution prepared for the Athens Symposium on “Banking Union, Monetary Policy and Economic Growth”, Otmar Issing describes forward guidance by central banks as the culmination of the idea of guiding expectations by pure communication. In practice, he argues, forward guidance has...

"Institutional Overburdening" to a large extent was a consequence of the "Great Moderation". This term indicates that it was a period in which inflation had come down from rather high levels. Growth and employment were at least satisfying and variability of output had substantially declined. It...

This Policy White Paper assesses several main elements of ECB's upcoming review of its monetary policy strategy, announced in January 2020. Four aspects of the review are discussed in detail: i) ECB's definition of price stability and the arguments for and against inflation targeting; ii) the...

The financial crisis which started in 2007 has caused a tremendous challenge for monetary policy. The simple concept of inflation targeting has lost its position as state of the art. There is a debate on whether the mandate of a central bank should not be widened. And, indeed, monetary policy...

In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis that started in 2007, policymakers were forced to respond quickly and forcefully to a recession caused not by short-term factors, but rather by an over-accumulation of debt by sovereigns, banks, and households: a so-called "balance sheet recession."...

A joint model of macroeconomic and term structure dynamics is specified and estimated for the euro area. The model comprises a backward-looking Phillips curve, a dynamic IS equation, a monetary policy rule as well as a specification of the dynamics of trend growth and the natural real interest...

During the turbulent 1970s and 1980s the Bundesbank established an outstanding reputation in the world of central banking. Germany achieved a high degree of domestic stability and provided safe haven for investors in times of turmoil in the international financial system. Eventually the...

We propose a classical approach to estimate factor-augmented vector autoregressive (FAVAR) models with time variation in the factor loadings, in the factor dynamics, and in the variance-covariance matrix of innovations. When the time-varying FAVAR is estimated using a large quarterly dataset of...