After almost four decades of price stability, inflation has recently approached historical highs. Initially driven by global energy and food price increases, the magnitude of the surge in inflation caught central banks and markets by surprise. Price pressures are now increasingly broadening to...

The extraordinary measures taken by the ECB to combat the financial crisis have led many observers to question whether the bank has put its independence at risk. The bank’s vow to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro has added a second (and potentially contradictory) goal alongside its...

At the height of the European sovereign debt crisis, the European Central Bank decided to purchase distressed European government bonds. Even worse, and more importantly, the ECB is providing direct support of several hundred billions of euros to troubled banks via its normal monetary policy...

Applying a t-DCC-GARCH model to daily spread data, four phases of interaction in euro area sovereign bond markets are identified between January 2008 and June 2013. The initial period (January-October 2008) is followed by a general rise in pairwise correlation values between November 2008 and...