In this speech, Sir John Gieve, Deputy Governor for financial stability, discusses the financial cycle and the UK economy. He argues that the US sub-prime market provided only the initial spark and fed a fire fuelled by much broader weaknesses in the financial sector. He outlines a number of...

This paper presents estimates of short and medium frequency cycles for eight key economic and financial variables of the Greek economy and explores their characteristics. Five alternative techniques are used: turning point analysis; bandpass filters; the Hodrick-Prescott filter; univariate...

It is well known that movements in lending rates are asymmetric; they rise quickly and sharply, but fall slowly and gradually. Not known is the fact that the asymmetry is stronger the less developed a country's financial system is. This new fact is here documented and explained in a model with an...

This paper examines the characteristics of the financial system that tend to accentuate the economy's cyclical fluctuations and, on occasion, end up causing asset bubbles and financial crises, like the one that started in 2007 with the US subprime mortgages. The paper discusses, first, some...

Better “financial soundness” of banks could help mitigate the volatility of financial cycles by reducing banks' risk exposure. But trying to improve financial soundness in the midst of a downturn can do the opposite—further aggravating the contraction of credit. Consistent with this...

The subprime loan mortgage crisis has revived scholarly interest in Minsky's financial instability hypothesis. The related mathematical models present two types of Minskian financial structures. We construct macrodynamic models that consider both structures and discuss financial instability and...

In this paper, we investigate the relationship between balance sheet size and leverage (i.e., leverage pro-cyclicality) and the pro-cyclicality of systemic risk using three systemic risk measures such as DCoVaR (Adrian & Brunnermeier, 2016), MES (Acharya et al., 2017), SRISK (Brownlees & Engle,...