This paper reviews what cryptocurrencies are, and it frames them within the context of historical monetary experiences and contemporary monetary economics. The paper argues that, as pure duciary private money, cryptocurrencies are a bubble without a fundamental value and that they will not...

At the end of 2017, the Bitcoin price dropped significantly by around 70% over two months. Since the introduction of Bitcoin futures coincided with this market crash, the new financial instrument might have caused the market crash, the literature emphasizing that the futures enabled investors to...

The cash strapped Turkey's gloomy economy was already ailing before the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic. The August rout of 2018 caused serious cracks as lira tumbled against the dollar (25% in three days and 41% in just two weeks); consequently, core inflation peaked at 26% and key interest rate...

Increasing financial and political turmoil in the 1970s and 1980s coupled with oil shock prompted Governors of the G-10 countries to engage in cooperation and financial collaboration that eventually paved the road for the establishment of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in 1974. After...

In the post-WWII (since the 1950s), there have been over 400 banking, currency, and sovereign debt crises, which translates to about 10 crises per annum; furthermore, the combined cost of the last five crises since the late 1990s is in excess of $30 trillion, but when the cost of the COVID-19...

Huge difference a decade makes; from an uninterrupted growth in one decade (i.e. birth of the Justice and Development Party – AKP in August 2001 and the rise of the AKP during 2002-2013) to another decade of unorthodox policies induced by ever more authoritarianism (i.e. the loss of Istanbul...

“History repeats itself” is not just an idiom, it is the naked truth; another agonizing fact is that humans do not seem to have learned from past experiences throughout history. For instance, misleading or policy error by the Fed (unwarranted tight-money policy stance in the 1920s) was...

On September 3-4, 2009, SUERF and Utrecht University School of Economics jointly organized the 28th SUERF Colloquium on "The Quest for Stability" in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The papers contained in this SUERF Study jointly published with DNB and Rabobank are based on contributions to this...