During recent decades most financial crises were caused by excessive public-sector expansion. The current Asian crisis, however, had its roots in private-sector over-expansion. In this respect it had more in common with the pre-1914 crises. In this paper we compare and contrast these two sets of...

The second half of AUgust 1998 was dominated by two events. From 14 to 28 August the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) intervened in the Hong Kong equity markets to prevent a speculative double play against their currency board. On 17 August Russia announced its default on sovereign bonds....

Owing to lags in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy, central banks put much weight on forecasts of the future paths of output and inflation. So there has been considerable recent interest in forward-looking Taylor-type reaction functions. Using publicly available data on the Monetary...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the choice between adopting a monetary base or an interest rate setting instrument to maintain financial stability. Our results suggest that the interest rate instrument is preferable, since during times of a panic or financial crisis the Central Bank...

No Abstract Available.

This paper proposes a measure of financial fragility that is based on economic welfare in a general model calibrated against UK data. The model comprises a household sector, three active hetrogeneous banks, a central bank/regulator, incomplete markets and endogenous default. We address the...

In this papaer we, first, by explicitly taking account of the private sectors influence and pressure on the monetary authorities, provide a more plausible representation of the motivations of the two main players. We then incorporate persistence into the model and show that the optimal policy of...

No abstract is available.

No Abstract is Available.