This article presents a simple environment that has banks creating and lending out money. The authors define money to be any object that circulates widely as a means of payment and a bank to be an agency that simultaneously issues money and monitors investments. While their framework allows...

In recent years several countries have granted greater independence to their central banks; others have made price stability the only objective of monetary policy. These two trends can be seen as social responses to a fundamental problem of central bank credibility called the time inconsistency...

This commentary focuses on two specific issues. The first asks, What are the market failures that actually create the need for the public regulation of bank safety and soundness? The second issue concerns the safety and soundness issues created by the two mortgage government-sponsored...

Forecasts, whether explicit or implicit, are at the heart of policy making. In considering forecasting for monetary policy, this article contrasts the forecasting processes at three central banks-the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Bank of England, and the U.S. Federal Reserve. ; In the United...

To further improve bank safety and soundness in the years ahead, the author makes two recommendations: that banks be examined and rated specifically on their organizational complexity and that systemically important banks that are too big to resolve quickly be recapitalized according to a model...