This article discusses the importance of ideology, institutions, politics, and economic knowledge for forecasting economic policies and their impact on macroeconomic developments. Following a general discussion of those factors, the article illustrates their forecasting usefulness by drawing on...

The bargaining power of international banks is currently still very high as compared to what it was at the time of the Bretton Woods conference. As a consequence, systemic financial crises are likely to remain recurrent phenomena with large effects on macroeconomic aggregates. Mainstream...

Latin America has been strongly affected by the international crisis and recession since late 2008. In comparison to historical experience, how has Latin America coped with the global crisis, which has been the role of different transmission mechanisms, and how have the region's structural and...

We review the competing explanations of the 2007-2008 global crisis, recall how governments around the world had to depart from established policy stances, and reflect on the legacy of the crisis both in terms of future challenges and changes in policy doctrine. The G-20 has addressed important...

We introduce a dynamic banking-macro model, which abstains from conventional mean-reversion assumptions and in which - similar to Brunnermeier and Sannikov (2010) - adverse asset-price movements and their impact on risk premia and credit spreads can induce instabilities in the banking sector. To...

Mit dem anstehenden Staatsanleihen-Kaufprogramm 'Outright Monetary Transactions' (OMT) der Europäischen Zentralbank (EZB) in Verbindung mit dem kürzlich eingesetzten Europäischen Stabilitätsmechanismus (ESM) hat das Thema 'monetäre Staatsfinanzierung' viel Aufmerksamkeit erfahren (z.B....

This paper presents a model addressing the conditions under which financial instability arises in the event of household debt. The model addresses two main cases. First, household debt is affected by functional income distribution. Second, household debt is affected by credit supply and depends...

The global financial crisis of 2007-09 has led to an intensive research program analyzing a wide range of issues related to financial crises. This paper presents a summary of a forthcoming book, Financial Crises: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Responses, that includes 19 contributions...

After the destructive impact of the global financial crisis of 2008, many believe that pre-crisis financial market regulation did not take the "big picture" of the system suffciently into account and, subsequently, financial supervision mainly "missed the forest for the trees". As a result, the...