This paper provides an introduction to the special issue on international lending of last resort. Starting from debates about rescue operations and unconventional policies of major central banks in the contexts of the Global Financial Crisis and the European Debt Crisis, it draws attention to...

The paper analyses the transmission of global financial shocks to individual member states of the European Monetary Union (EMU), in which monetary policy is delegated to the ECB and financial markets are fully integrated. Using a panel VAR model, we show that the asymmetric effects of global...

Recently the Interim Committee of the International Monetary Fund met in Hamburg without making significant progress on the proposal for a substitution account. One of the main initiatives toward restructuring the international monetary system thus was postponed if not indefinitely suspended....