This paper examines the fiscal and monetary policy options available to China as a sovereign currency-issuing nation operating in a dollar standard world. We first summarize a number of issues facing China, including the possibility of slower growth, global imbalances, and a number of domestic...

IT progress and its application to the financial industry have inspired central banks and academics to analyse the merits of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) accessible to the broad public. This paper first reviews the advantages and risks of such CBDC. It then discusses two prominent...

The paper models the links between financial fragility, asset markets and monetary policy. It is shown that central bank's concern about the cost of financial disruption generates an asymmetric response, thus contributing to the creation of an asset price bubble. In an economy with a highly...

Italy’s policy of fiscal consolidation and growth-friendly structural reforms has substantially improved its economic prospects, but the adverse sentiment that the country has faced in the sovereign bond market over the past years has deep roots. It reflects lingering anxieties over the euro...

In this paper, we develop a financial stress index for France that can be used as a real-time composite indicator for the state of financial stability in France. We take 17 financial variables from different market segments and extract a common stress component using a dynamic approximate factor...

The growth and deepening of financial markets entailed the expectation that the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission would lose its importance. The paper explains why, on the contrary, the banking sector has become a major locus of origination and amplification of macro-financial...

The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

This volume is a collection of the speeches, presentations and papers from a conference on "The International Financial Crisis and Policy Challenges in Asia and the Pacific". The event was co-hosted by the People's Bank of China (PBC) and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) to mark the...

Evidence abounds on the propagation of financial stresses originating in the US mortgage market to banking systems worldwide through international funding markets. But the transmission of this external funding shock to the real economy via bank lending is surprisingly under-examined, given the...