During the last decade, a new consensus has emerged among economists with respect to the way in which monetary policy should be conducted. According to this view, monetary policy should be focused in order to achieve a given inflation target. However, the

The behavior of Colombian politics over recent years, associated to the set of interventions on the exchange market, is the stylized fact that motivated this study. The objective is to measure the relative size of currency exchange interventions during 2004 and 2006, a period of appreciation of...

Central banks act as lenders of last resort to commercial banks and other financial institutions. However, there is much controversy about whether or not they should perform this function. This article analyses, in the first place, the principal aspects o

Since the mid-1970s, the banking industry has been changing rapidly, but our analysis of its regulation has been lagging. Leaving aside the sterile discussion about the intrinsic instability of the industry, today its regulation aims at preventing systemi

Almost four years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the monetary policy stance in most advanced economies remains extraordinarily loose, with policy rates close to zero and a number of non-conventional stimuli still in place. The resulting prominence of monetary policy responds, first, to...