The paper aims to describe the contribution of four Harvard economists to the interpretation of the Great Depression and the policy decision making from 1933 to 1938. Lauchlin B. Currie, Jacob Viner, John H. Williams, Harry D. White, eminent scholars in the field of monetary and international...

This paper uses Hyman P. Minsky’s approach to analyze the current international financial crisis, which was initiated by problems in the American real estate market. In a 1987 manuscript, Minsky had already recognized the importance of the trend toward securitization of home mortgages. This...

This paper traces the evolution of housing finance in the United States from the deregulation of the financial system in the 1970s to the breakdown of the savings and loan industry and the development of GSE (government-sponsored enterprise) securitization and the private financial system. The...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium “New Paradigms in Money and Finance?” All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

We investigate U.S. monetary and fiscal policy regime interactions in a model, where regimes are determined by latent autoregressive policy factors with endogenous feedback. Policy regimes interact strongly: shocks that switch one policy from active to passive tend to induce the other policy to...

On 11-12 May 2011, SUERF and the Belgian Financial Forum, in association with the Brussels Finance Institute and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) organized the 29th SUERF Colloquium "New Paradigms in Money and Finance?". All the papers in the present SUERF Study are based on...

The single currency of the Eurozone is experiencing difficulties due to a number of factors. One is the lack of integration of its banking sector, lack of a mechanism for debt consolidation and popular disincentives to a lack of equal burdens of the costs of union. This paper compares the...

This paper examines the extent to which the evolution of monetary policy frameworks and actual policy decisions in the United States and Japan contributed to the differences in macroeconomic performance of the two countries in the 1980s and 1990s. It considers the extent to which monetary policy...

In this paper, we argue that rising debt levels have caused a revival of financial repression in the Euro Area and the US to reduce debt-servicing costs and even liquidate debt. We describe how, in addition to the “safe haven capital flight,” the Federal Reserve directly represses US bond...

We conduct a systematic analysis of the costs and benefits of large-scale securities purchases, using the Federal Reserve's QE4 program as a concrete example. This program was initiated at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020 and continued for two years, leading to a doubling of the Fed's...