High inflation economies have ultimately been successful in stabilising their prices using the exchange rate as a nominal anchor. Besides stabilization, these recent examples have shown boom-recession cycles, contrary to what can be expected from (pure) money-based stabilizations. Various...

Costs of a monetary union are typically analysed in the context of the optimum currency area approach, looking at the likelihood of asymmetric real disturbances, the degree of real wage flexibility and of labour mobility. But it is also important to consider the leeway of monetary and fiscal...

Banks have been lowering their high pre-crisis leverage levels and are preparing for stricter regulatory capital requirements, and in the process have been reducing their lending. With the banking sector expected to shrink considerably, other actors, especially institutional investors, and new...

Discussions at the October 2010 OECD Financial Roundtable conveyed a rather sombre view regarding the current outlook and risks, heightened by financial sector weaknesses, ongoing deleveraging and sovereign debt. Policy makers should be prepared for downside risks to materialise along the way to...

High inflation economies, especially the Latin American cases like Argentina and Brazil, have ultimately been successful in stabilising their prices using the exchange rate as a nominal anchor. Contrary to conventional wisdom inflation in these cases has not been reduced at the cost of temporary...

The financial market outlook and risks as well as the impact of regulatory reforms on the financial sector were the topics discussed at the October 2011 OECD Financial Roundtable. Concerns about the current situation in financial markets were centred on the sovereign debt and banking crisis in...

The current crisis with its on-going banking sector problems has brought to the fore various cases of financial fraud and banking scandals that have additionally undermined the already low confidence in the sector. This has raised concerns about structural flaws in the way banks operate and are...

We calculate core inflation indicators for Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom using two structural vector-autoregression (SVAR) models. In the first one we use out-put and prices to identify supply and demand shocks by long-run...