The economics literature lacks articles that provide a broad roadmap-let alone a logical explanation-of the new set of Federal Reserve policy tools that were created to counter the COVID-19 recession. This study provides an overview of the motivation for these new credit-easing programs-namely...

The economic crisis that began in 2007 and still lingers has invited comparison with the Great Depression of the 1930s. It has also generated renewed interest in Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's explanation of the latter as mainly the consequence of the Fed's failure as a lender of last...

This paper contributes to the literature on moral hazard, lending of last resort and the political origins of banking crises. Drawing on newly accessed quantitative and qualitative archival sources the paper documents how a bank-Banco de Cataluña-formed a coalition with the Dictatorship of...

This paper studies optimal bank capital requirements in a model of endogenous bank funding conditions. I find that requirements should be higher during good times such that a macroprudential "buffer" is provided. However, whether banks can use buffers to maintain lending during a financial...

Countercyclical bank capital requirements have emerged as a popular regulatory tool to help smooth financial cycles. The idea is to reduce capital requirements when exogenous shocks cause aggregate bank capital to decrease so that regulation does not needlessly constrain banks' supply of credit....

Specific ideas about the Fisher relation between real and nominal interest rates and more general ideas about the nature of the central bank's duty to support the financial system in times of crisis were important to the Monetarist re-assessment of the causes of the Great Depression and what...