Since the late-1990s, the global economy is characterised by historically low risk premia and an unprecedented widening of external imbalances. This paper explores to what extent these two global trends can be understood as a reaction to three structural shocks in different regions of the global...

The Federal Reserve responded to the global financial crisis by initiating an unprecedented expansion of central bank money (bank reserves) once the policy rate had reached the lower bound. To capture the salient features of the crisis, we develop a model where the central bank can provide...