The causes of the Great Recession lie in misguided government policy, not in the underlying workings of the market.Executive Summary:For many, the Great Recession and the boom that preceded it are evidence of the failure of the supposed deregulation of financial markets in the last decade and...

The use of macro stress tests to assess bank solvency has developed rapidly over the past few years. This development was reinforced by the financial crisis, which resulted in substantial losses for banks and created general uncertainty about the banking sector's loss-bearing capacity. Macro...

This report presents a long-term view of the evolution of financing of EU non-financial corporations (NFCs) in recent decades. It finds a decline in NFC leverage since at least 2008, and across countries, size categories and industries. It also documents a growing role of non-bank financial...

On May 11-12, 2011, SUERF, the Belgian Financial Forum, the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) jointly organised the 29th SUERF Colloquium New paradigms in money and finance? The papers included in this SUERF Study are based on contributions to the...

The Basel II Accord requires that banks and other Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) communicate their daily risk forecasts to the appropriate monetary authorities at the beginning of each trading day, using one or more risk models to measure Value-at-Risk (VaR). The risk estimates of...

Indicators based on the ratio of credit to GDP have been found to be highly useful predictors of banking crises. We study the difference in this ratio as an early warning indicator. We test a large number of different versions of the differenced credit-to-GDP ratio with data on Euro area...

This Policy Brief introduces the Gini Trade Index (GTI) as a new trade synthetic key performance indicator capable of capturing the different distribution of trade values across firm characteristics and across countries. The new indicator replicates the well-known features of the traditional...

Periods of excessive credit growth can imply emergence of systemic financial stress which may result in financial crisis causing severe losses in the real economy. The base indicators of overheatedness in the credit markets are the expansion of the credit-to-GDP ratio and its deviation from its...

The credit-to-GDP gap is a fundamental indicator used to identify credit bubbles. Currently, the indicator takes into account aggregate credit as a ratio of GDP, without distinguishing between local and foreign currency. In the Albanian financial system, foreign currency loans comprise about...