To fight deflationary pressures in the euro area, the ECB has been conducting exceptional policies, such as negative interest rates on excess reserves of banks on their accounts at the Eurosystem, or massive purchases of assets, essentially public bonds. The interest rate on the main refinancing...

This paper analyses the issue of the dynamics of the TARGET2 system balances during the sovereign debt crisis, when some countries registered a decisive inflow of the central bank liquidity and others showed an outflow. The dynamics in the TARGET2 are here explained as being due to a fall in the...

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.

During the European financial crisis, the European Central Bank implemented a series of unconventional monetary policy measures. We argue that these unconventional monetary policy measures created soft budget constraints for the Eurozone countries by lowering their bond yield spreads. This...

While many central banks around the world have pursued quantitative easing programmes in recent years responding to the weak inflation outlook, the European Central Bank (ECB) faces unique legal constraints with respect to its Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) launched in 2015. Most...

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...

We investigate the effectiveness of the bank lending channel, that is, whether, and if so how, the accommodative monetary policies of the European Central Bank (ECB) mitigated the disruption in bank lending between 2008 and 2014. We show that both standard and non-standard measures of the...

We study spillovers from bank to sovereign risk in the euro area using difference specifications around the European Central Bank's release of stress test results for 130 significant banks on October 26, 2014. We document that following this information release bank equity prices in stressed...

Since August 2014 the Target2 liabilities of the Bank of Italy to the Eurosystem are on an upward trend. From August 2014 to September 2016 they have increased by € 223.7 billion. According to the narrative of the ECB, surging Target2 liabilities of peripheral countries of the euro area would...