The sub-prime crisis began in mid-2007 as a bursting of the US housing market bubble and became a truly global meltdown in 2008. Renewed instability in financial markets precipitated awareness of how policy makers must react to systemic failures. This paper discusses the primary policy issues...

This paper describes how countries adjusted their monetary policy in response to the Great Depression. We estimate central bank rate reaction functions for a panel of 22 countries during the years 1925-1936. We find that countries moved away from convertibility towards a more 'modern' monetary...

EMU's design is seriously flawed. Monetary union was established without political union, creating a single eurozone economy that cannot be governed with the combination of macroeconomic policy instruments that modern national governments have. Its exceptionally independent central bank, the...