In most countries, the central bank is required to hold reserve assets as a means of providing credibility for the value of the fiat currency. These assets can be in the form of gold, foreign exchange or some other internationally recognised reserve asset and are held to permit the country to...

Since the global financial crisis, the Swiss National Bank has been accumulating reserve assets amounting to the size of the Swiss GDP. Yet, the Swiss franc is still considered to be significantly over-valued. This paper analyzes the drivers behind the new situation and discusses challenges and...

Exchange rates are crucial variables for each economy as they affect the price at which a country can exchange goods and services with other currency areas. A strong domestic currency makes it relatively cheap to import goods and services, but at the same time renders domestic goods and services...

The shift to inflation targeting has contributed to the relatively low inflation observed in some emerging market economies although, as noted by many economists, the preconditions required for a successful implementation were not in place. The existence of managed exchange rate regimes, a...

This paper analyses the impact of central bank interven-tions in the inflation targeting regime. The results of empirical stud-ies in this paper show if there is a shock of the exchange rate, which would lead to depreciation of the exchange rate, a central bank may decide to mush instability on...

Given buoyant capital inflows and managed exchange rates the majority of emerging market central banks have continued to accumulate massive foreign reserves. If left unsterilized, the liquidity expansion can threaten domestic macroeconomic stability. To contain domestic inflation these central...

The financial crisis clearly illuminated the potential amplifying role of financial factors on macroeconomic developments. Indeed, the heavy impairments of banks’ balance sheets brought to the fore the banking sector’s ability to provide a smooth flow of credit to the real economy. However,...

Through the euro area crisis, financial fragmentation across jurisdictions became a prime concern for the single monetary policy. The ECB broadened the scope of its instruments and enacted a series of non-standard measures to engineer an appropriate degree of policy accommodation. The...

We examine the economic consequences of an interest-bearing design of the Central-Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), and extend the discussion to an open-economy context with trade and capital flows. We use a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to simulate a baseline scenario with...

The credit risk exposure of the German banking system is growing again after the 2009 peak and its subsequent reduction. This column comments it through the lens of the Target2 net balances in connection with the capital flows experienced by the Eurozone (EZ) balance of payments. Several aspects...