This monograph challenges the myth that the recent banking crisis was caused by insufficient statutory regulation of financial markets. Though it finds that statutory regulation failed, and that market participants took more risks than they should have done, it appears that statutory regulation...

This paper presents an overview of key proposals formulated by the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB), the European Banking Authority (EBA) and the European Central Bank (ECB) in the context of the review of the macroprudential policy framework of the European Union (EU), aimed at improving its...

The government support of financial firms through direct assistance and programs to improve market liquidity during the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Whether a given firm is ex-ante ‘Too Big To Fail' in the mind of government agents is not...

This paper studies the links between financial soundness indicators and financial crisis episodes controlling for several macroeconomic and fiscal variables in 20 OECD countries. We focus our attention on aggregate capital adequacy, asset quality and bank profitability indicators compiled by the...

Many commentators have argued that if the Federal Reserve had followed a stricter monetary policy earlier this decade when the housing bubble was forming, and if Congress had not deregulated banking but had imposed tighter financial standards, the housing boom and bust - and the subsequent...

Basel III uses the gap between the credit-to-GDP ratio and its long-term trend as a guide for setting countercyclical capital buffers. Criticism of this choice centres on three areas: (i) the suitability of the guide given the objective of the buffer; (ii) the early warning indicator properties...

This paper studies a newly compiled data set of annual balance sheets of more than 11,000 commercial banks across 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data expose the central role of large banks for credit cycles and financial instability throughout modern financial history and the...

The prospect of central banks issuing digital currency (CBDC) immediately raises the question of how this new form of money should co-exist and interact with existing forms of money. This paper evaluates three different scenarios for the implementation of CBDC in terms of their monetary policy...

This paper is a critical engagement with the four design principles for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) recently proposed by Kumhof and Noone (KN). It is argued that the implicit notion of parity underlying KN's analysis is too narrow as it is only focused on the exchange rate between CBDC...