The credit risk exposure of the German banking system is growing again after the 2009 peak and its subsequent reduction. This column comments it through the lens of the Target2 net balances in connection with the capital flows experienced by the Eurozone (EZ) balance of payments. Several aspects...

Should central banks care about inequality? To address this question, we extend a standard model of time inconsistency in monetary policy to allow for heterogeneity. As in the standard analysis, lack of policy commitment leads to a bias towards socially excessive inflation. But the novel result...

We examine the economic consequences of an interest-bearing design of the Central-Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and extend the discussion to an open-economy context with trade and capital flows. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to simulate a baseline scenario with...

Through the euro area crisis, financial fragmentation across jurisdictions became a prime concern for the single monetary policy. The ECB broadened the scope of its instruments and enacted a series of non-standard measures to engineer an appropriate degree of policy accommodation. The...

The 1990s currency debacles revitalized the search for early warning and forward-looking indicators of financial vulnerabilities. This paper contributes to this task by proposing an approach to assess central bank solvency and to examine the factors putting it at risk, and by refining the...

Among the countries currently considering issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC), including nearly all of G20, there is a strong preference for a retail CBDC made available to the general public through private intermediaries. This Policy Brief sheds light on the technical complexities...

The author evaluates the effect of the Bank of Canada's conditional commitment regarding the target overnight rate on longer-term market interest rates by taking into account the relationship between interest rates, inflation, and unemployment rates. By using vector autoregressive models of...

The European sovereign debt crisis represents an interesting opportunity to investigate the reaction of the European Central Bank as a crisis fighting institution and the importance of central bank personalities in policy execution. Accordingly, this paper aims at investigating to what extent...

The paper reviews the current literature on the subject in both the New Consensus and Post Keynesian frameworks. It shows that both approaches give to central banks a wrong goal (inflation, distribution, curbing speculation, and so on) and a wrong instrument (interest rate rule). The paper...