Historically high levels of private and public debt coupled with already very low short-term interest rates appear to limit the options for stimulative monetary policy in many advanced economies today. One option that has not yet been considered is monetary financing by central banks to boost...

Conventional economic policy models focus only on selected elements of the central bank balance sheet, in particular monetary liabilities and sometimes foreign reserves. The canonical model of an independent central bank assumes that it chooses money (or an interest rate) unconstrained by a need...

I offer a macroeconomic perspective on the "Reserves for All" (RFA) proposal to let the general public use electronic central bank money. After distinguishing RFA from cryptocurrencies and relating the proposal to discussions about narrow banking and the abolition of cash I propose an...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

How does central bank conservatism affect labor market reform? In this paper we examine the economic forces at work. An increase in conservatism triggers two opposite effects. It reduces the inflation bias of discretionary monetary policy and hence the benefits of a reform. It also increases...

The Bulgarian monetary system was established, immediately after independence.Having experienced it already under Ottoman rule, newly independent Bulgaria adopted thebimetallic standard. Without being a member of the Latin Monetary Union, it tried broadlyto follow the principles of the...

This paper assesses the contribution of the European Central Bank (ECB) to Germany's ongoing economic crisis, a vicious circle of decline in which the country has become stuck since the early 1990s. It is argued that the ECB continues the Bundesbank tradition of asymmetric policymaking: the bank...

This paper investigates why Europe fared particularly poorly in the global economic crisis that began in August 2007. It questions the self-portrait of Europe as the victim of external shocks, pushed off track by reckless policies pursued elsewhere. It argues instead that Europe had not only...

This paper examines Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's recipe for deflation fighting and the specific policy actions he took in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Both in his academic and in his policy work, Bernanke has made the case that monetary policy is able to stem...