Fractional reserve regimes generate fragile banking, and full reserve regimes (e.g., narrow banking) remove fragility at the cost of suppressing the role of banks as lenders. A Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) could provide safe money, but at the cost of potentially disrupting bank lending....

On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

The main result of the quick reactions of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to the Covid-19 crisis are that more than 20% of their public debt is now held by these central banks and that the balance sheet of the ECB is now near 50% of GDP (33% for the Fed). Two...

The 2007-2008 financial crisis demonstrated both the responsibilities that central bankers, alongside other actors, bear for turbulences of this kind as well as how economics can be used to provide central bankers and governments with the understanding and tools that they need to prevent the...

Because of secrecy, little is known about the political economy of central bank lending. Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for...

The interest rate assumptions for macroeconomic forecasts differ considerably among central banks. Common approaches are given by the assumption of constant interest rates, interest rates expected by market participants, or the central bank's own interest rate expectations. From a theoretical...

Recent research has found that macroeconomic survey forecasts of uncertainty exhibit several deficiencies, such as horizon-dependent biases and lower accuracy than simple unconditional uncertainty forecasts. We examine the inflation uncertainty forecasts from the Bank of England, the Banco...

We examine the financial conditions of dealers that participated in two of the Federal Reserve's lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities -- the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF) -- that provided liquidity against a range of assets during...