A major factor behind this crisis is financialization of the system, with a growing disconnect between the monetary and the real sector. Some proponents of the Islamic finance claim such financial crisis would have been avoided, if asset-backed Islamic finance were adopted. However, while...

Central banks hold gold reserves that are designed to build confidence in fiat currency. This confidence is undermined if the price of gold falls significantly or rises significantly. Central banks thus have an incentive to manage the price of gold. Such management is evident in fixed gold...

In recent years, warnings of a populist threat to central bank independence have proliferated. These warnings are based on a deep-seated antagonism between technocracy and populism.I argue that to understand current challenges for central banks, we should question the assumed antagonism between...

Today, the world economy is at the brink of a major recession at zero lower bound. The recession has been fomented by the underconsumption induced by (i) the increasing income inequality, which is inherent in the neoliberal policymaking followed the last third of a century, and (ii) the...

Money long-run super-neutrality and the vertical long-run Phillips curve are two widely shared beliefs in the economics profession and among economic policy-makers. The present survey is devoted to anomalous empirical evidence which challenges this view. We consider a variety of studies,...

The economic downturn which had begun in the rich countries of the North is hurting the millions of innocent people of the developing South. While a large section of economist believe that the financial crisis that had began in America's sub-prime mortgage market, later snow balled into a global...

The currencies of nations, in their utility as a medium of exchange and store of value, behave variously according to the integrated dynamics of free enterprise, the central bank and government policy. As such, foreign exchange rates fluctuate constantly with consequences for the growth of...

Long-term real interest rates across the world have fallen by about 450 basis points over the past 30 years. The co-movement in rates across both advanced and emerging economies suggests a common driver: the global neutral real rate may have fallen. In this paper we attempt to identify which...

Consider two views of the global financial crisis. One view looks across the border: it blames external imbalances, the unprecedented current account deficits and surpluses in recent years. Another view looks within the border: it faults domestic financial systems where risks originated in...

Shocks to capital utilization are introduced in a structural macroeconomic closed-economy model with financial frictions to capture disruptions on the ability of the capital stock to provide capital services used in production. Estimates for the Euro Area and the United States show that these...