From its inception, the Federal Reserve has operated payment systems that let banks move money for their customers. Checks, wire transfers, and electronic consumer payments all happen thanks to the Federal Reserve. Congress by statute specified which banks get access to the Fed’s payment...

The Eurozone today is going into the same deflationary situation that the U.S. did under Jackson's destruction of the Second Bank, and the post-Civil War budget surpluses that deflated the economy. But whereas the Fed's creation was designed to inflate the U.S. economy, Europe's European Central...

The coronavirus pandemic triggered strong political action across Europe. Mandatory restrictions to increase social distancing were imposed, commonly known as lockdowns. In some cases, entire countries were virtually locked down for several weeks at a time, contributing to a very severe downturn...

The euro area suffers from excessive public debt, which is the primary cause of the so-called fragmentation. It should be remedied by fiscal consolidation instead of the quasi-fiscal activities of the European Central Bank, which are inconsistent with its legal status, compromise its...

We present a two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping generations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type as well as monopolistic frictions and staggered adjustment in the goods and labor market. We allow for public investment and...

We present an analytically tractable two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model of a currency union featuring an overlapping gen- erations structure of the Blanchard (1985)-Yaari (1965) type. It enables us to study the transmission and spillover effects of a wider range of fiscal shocks...

In studies concluding that public debt may hamper GDP growth, the debt tipping effects are estimated as if there were a single global currency. This means that such studies ignore the likely biggest cause of changes in growth rates, namely damage from exchange rate liquidity shocks because we do...

Rising public debt everywhere has raised the question of how to reduce debt again in the future. High public debt also seems to be an impediment for the exit of central banks from ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing. Historical precedents and proposals have included austerity,...

The paper contains a retrospective analysis of macroeconomic policy and reforms in the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) from 1992 to 2021, after obtaining political and economic independence in 1991. Special attention is given to problems of macroeconomic stabilization and economic...

With this paper, our objective is to empirically study public debt sustainability by estimating a fiscal reaction function where the primary balance relative to GDP is assumed to be a function of the public debt to GDP ratio of the previous year and of other macroeconomic variables. In...