Business cycles imply liquidity risks for banks. This paper explores how these risks influence bank lending over the cycle. With forward-looking banks, lending cycles, credit booms and busts, or suppressed and highly fragile bank systems can emerge, depending on the magnitude of liquidity risks....

The volume includes theoretical articles on banks' liability restrictions, on the possible causes of the banking crisis and economic-policy recommendations on banking regulation by Hans-Werner Sinn in the past three decades.

Banking regulation routinely designates some assets as safe and thus does not require banks to hold any additional capital to protect against losses from these assets. A typical such safe asset is domestic government debt. There are numerous examples of banking regulation treating domestic...