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.

Using the recursive unit root test by Phillips et al. (2011) we show that the Target balances of the German Bundesbank have been explosive from the beginning of 2009 to the beginning of 2013. By implementing a full-allotment policy and reducing the required minimum quality of collaterals in...

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...

For the largest 55 German banks, we detect the presence of countercyclical yield seeking in the form of acquisition of high-yielding periphery bonds in the period from Q1 2008 to Q2 2011. This investment strategy is pursued by banks not subject to a bailout, banks characterised by high...

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...

For the largest 55 German banks, we detect the presence of countercyclical yield seeking in the form of acquisition of high-yielding periphery bonds in the period from Q1 2008 to Q2 2011. This investment strategy is pursued by banks not subject to a bailout, banks characterised by high...