As the one-hundredth anniversary of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act approaches, we assess whether the nation‘s experiment with the Federal Reserve has been a success or a failure. Drawing on a wide range of recent empirical research, we find the following: (1) The Fed‘s full history (1914 to...

Governors and senior officials representing some two dozen central banks from Africa and other regions of the world met at the BIS in May 2011 to discuss the monetary policy and financial stability issues facing Africa after the global financial crisis. This volume brings together the background...

This paper analyses the main drivers of the ECB's balance sheet and profit and loss account over the first 11 years of the ECB's existence. Furthermore, the paper assesses the financial strength of the ECB. As monetary policy operations are normally conducted by national central banks under the...

This paper assesses Revolutionary and Napoleonic wartime economic policy. Suspension of gold convertibility in 1797 allowed the Bank of England to nurture British monetary orthodoxy. The Order of the Privy Council suspended gold payments on Bank of England notes and afforded simultaneous...

This paper is a review of Danmarks Nationalbank's recent analysis of the prospects of implementing a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) in Denmark. We concur with Nationalbanken's conclusion that CBDC does not add efficiency or further functionality to existing payment solutions. We argue,...

The paper tries to give a first assessment of the tools used by central banks for interventions from the starting of the financial crisis to end-March 2009 using the results of a research conducted through the analysis of the evolution of central banks' balance sheets.The first part of the paper...

The paper studies the dynamic nature of optimal solutions under commitment in Barro-Gordon and new-Keynesian models and, finds two interesting parameters - the implied targets and the persistence parameter that governs the adjustment toward the implied targets. The implied targets generally...

This article describes in some detail the properties of free market money and banking so as to contrast state-controlled central bank money and banking. It examines seven steps that government takes to replace the free market with central banking as it creates a banking system cartel. A number...

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...