One of the important consequences to be drawn from the course of the financial crisis up to now is the insight that more attention must be paid in the future to the factors of liquidity, liquidity management and liquidity protection. That holds true for the protection of the stability of an...

The paper provides an overview of the hedge fund industry, mainly from a financial stability and European angle. It is primarily based on an extensive analysis of information from the TASS database. On the positive side of the financial stability assessment, hedge funds have a role as providers...

The writing of this article predates by several months the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the takeover of Credit Suisse which occurred in March 2023. It does not represent the views of the European Central Bank (ECB) and should not be construed as linked to or an advice for the winding down...

Existing stress tests do not capture feedback loops between individual institutions and the financial system. To identify feedback loops, the European Systemic Risk Board has developed macroprudential surveys that ask banks and insurers how they would behave in a macroeconomic stress scenario....

Virtual currencies are a contemporary form of private money. Thanks to their technological properties, their global transaction networks are relatively safe, transparent, and fast. This gives them good prospects for further development. However, they remain unlikely to challenge the dominant...

The attention for the governance of financial sector supervisors is of a recent date. The debate has risen to the fore as part of the wider discussion about the appropriate institutional organization of financial supervision and the drive for compliance with international best practices in the...

In this paper, we present a set of specific measures to quantify the state and evolution of financial integration in the euro area. Five key markets are considered, namely the money, corporate bond, government bond, credit and equity markets. Building upon the law of one price, we developed two...

Over the past few years the CDS market's role has evolved from mostly providing default protection towards credit risk trading. The first-ever credit event in a developed country's sovereign CDS has further highlighted the importance of the CDS market from a macro-prudential perspective....