We turn our attention to the role of money for determining nominal magnitudes. Using US data, we find that the aggregate “nominal output plus and stock market capitalisation” is closely related to the money stock, lending support to one of Milton Friedman’s key monetarist propositions....

On 6 September 2012 the Governing Council of the ECB decided on the technical details of new sovereign bond purchasing operations, called the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMTs). The notes in this compilation evaluate the framework of the OMTs and discuss various aspects of the interventions...

After the dramatic rescue package for the euro area, the governing council of the European Central Bank decided to purchase European government bonds - to ensure an "orderly monetary policy transmission mechanism". Many observers argued that, by bond purchases, national fiscal policies could...

This paper provides a first preliminary assessment of the recent two 3-year long-term refinancing operations (3Y LTROs) conducted by the ECB by putting them into a broader context. The perspective taken is that prevailing in the first half of the year 2012, directly after the path-breaking ECB...

This paper argues that using gold as collateral for highly distressed bonds would bring great benefits to the euro area in terms of reduced financing costs and bridge-financing. It is mindful of the legal issues that this will raise and that such a suggestion will be highly controversial....

This paper briefly assesses the effectiveness of the different non-standard monetary policy tools in the Euro Area. Its main focus is on the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) Programme which is praised by some as the ECB’s “magic wand”. Moreover, it discloses further possible unintended...