The paper establishes that sovereigns, like banks, need a lender of last resort (LoLR). In the euro area the ECB, with its estimated €3.4 trillion non-inflationary loss absorption capacity, is the only credible sovereign LoLR. The ECB/Eurosystem has been acting as sovereign LoLR through its...

This paper aims to provide a rigorous analysis of Milton Friedman’s famous parable of the ‘helicopter’ drop of money. A helicopter drop of money is a permanent/irreversible increase in the nominal stock of fiat base money with a zero nominal interest rate, which respects the intertemporal...

Confidence has a strong influence on security prices and volatility, but has received little attention in mainstream macroeconomics. Kamada and Miura (2014) have recently revived this concept in their double-layered model of private and public information and shown how herding behavior emerges...

Since the international financial crisis, the external environment was an important source of risks and uncertainties, the banking and financial markets of most of the states were marked by successive waves of turbulence, central banks reverted the task of ensuring financial stability to the...

We performed a retrospective analysis of Argentina’s monetary system, focusing on its limitations to satisfy the requirements of the national economy. We describe the various aspects associated with the need to establish a central bank as the governing body of that system. At the same time we...

The paper aims to analyze the reasons why monetary policy is put into question by the transformations suffered during the recent decades by the financial systems of advanced industrial countries. It also seeks to highlight opportunities for improving monetary policy and its instruments, in...

Stability-oriented European institutions correspond to the general prescriptions of the ‘new macroeconomics consensus’. This contribution provides an assessment of the pros and cons of these institutions in terms of macro stabilisation and exchange-rate swings drawing on different scenarios....

We examine central bank intervention in foreign exchange markets using a dynamic censored regression model. We allow the amount of purchase and sale interventions to depend nonlinearly upon lagged values of intervention and on measures of disorderly foreign exchange markets. Using data for the...

Since Spain joined the EMU, two main important factors behind the housing boom appear to be the decrease of nominal interest rates and demographic factors. In this paper we estimate a New Keynesian model of a currency area, using data for Spain and the rest of the EMU to study the importance of...

This paper provides evidence that central bank interventions had a statistically significant impact on easing stress in unsecured interbank markets during the first phase of the subprime crisis which began in July 2007. Extraordinary liquidity provisions, such as the Term Auction Facility by the...