Bankers are directors of Federal Reserve Banks. I document that a) banker directors of the New York Fed attend more meetings about the financial sector; b) elections for Reserve Bank directorships are more contested for bankers, but less so for large banks and American Banking Association...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

The Term Auction Facility (TAF) was designed by the Federal Reserve during the financial crisis to inject emergency short-term funds into banks as a supplement to the lender of last resort discount window offerings. We describe how the Federal Reserve altered the design of the Term Auction...

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...

In this paper we assess whether forward guidance for monetary policy regarding the future path of interest rates is desirable. We distinguish between two cases where forward guidance for monetary policy may be helpful. First, forward guidance may reveal private information of the central bank....

In this paper we assess whether forward guidance for monetary policy regarding the future path of interest rates is desirable. We distinguish between two cases where forward guidance for monetary policy may be helpful. First, forward guidance may reveal private information of the central bank....

John Maynard Keynes (1930) asserted that the central bank sways the long-term interest rate through the influence of its policy rate on the short-term interest rate. Recent empirical research shows that Keynes's conjecture holds for long-term Treasury yields in the United States. This paper...

The application, or to be more precise, the misapplication of securitization in the mortgage market had fatal consequences for the financial sector worldwide. More over securitization techniques enabled single banks to reduce their individual risk while at the same time transferred greater risk...