This Occasional Paper analyses how significant expansions in central banks' mandates, roles and instruments can result in challenges to the independence of monetary policy. The paper reviews, in particular, some of the key challenges to central bank independence brought about by the global...

This article explains the roots of financial crises in one of the oldest and most fundamental problems of commercial law: hidden leverage. Common law courts wrestled with this problem for centuries and developed a time – tested solution: the doctrine of secret liens. If the debtor becomes...

On 23 June 2010, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank and SUERF jointly organised a conference on "The Future of Banking in CESEE after the Financial Crisis", incorporating the SUERF Annual Lecture, delivered by Manfred Schepers, Vice President, Finance at the European Bank for Reconstruction and...

The Central Bank of Ireland and SUERF organised a joint conference in Dublin on 20th September, 2010 on the general theme of Regulation and Banking after the Crisis. In the best traditions of SUERF, the programme included papers and presentations from the three main constituencies of SUERF:...

This paper arms central bank policy makers with ways to think about interactions between financial stability and monetary policy. We frame the issue of whether to integrate financial stability into monetary policy operating rules by appealing to the observation that in actual economies financial...

We propose that policymakers responding to novel contingencies are subject to first-mover disadvantage. Like innovation in the private sector, developing effective solutions to novel policy problems requires a messy process of discovery, experimentation, and repeated failure. Much as...

This paper develops a micro-founded general equilibrium model of the financial system composed of ultimate borrowers, ultimate lenders and financial intermediaries. The model is used to investigate the impact of uncertainty about the likelihood of governmental bailouts on leverage, interest...

This paper develops a theoretical model of trading in the federal funds market that captures characteristics of discount window borrowing and the federal funds market during the first year of the financial crisis, including the narrowing of the spread between the discount rate and the target...

Timothy Geithner's memoir of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 is an important historical document offering details of how policies were formed and implemented during the financial crisis of 2007-2008, showing the political constraints, and offering lessons for future crises. Walter Bagehot's...