Commodities have attracted considerable interest as a financial investment in recent years. This article discusses the factors behind their growing appeal and assesses the extent to which market characteristics, such as price volatility, have changed as a result. The feature concludes that...

Global banks are changing. With a new set of rules come new business models. We review the international dimension of the financial crisis, centring on cross-border losses and cross-currency funding problems that prompted authorities to adopt wide-ranging rescue measures and liquidity...

The financial market turbulence in 1998, as other crises previously, produced strong price movements in the securities markets worldwide. This reflected, first, a general reassessment of credit risk, and, second, a drying-up of liquidity even in some of the largest mature securities markets. As...

Die Autoren der Beiträge des Bandes befassen sich mit dem Transmissionsmechanismus in der Geldpolitik. Im Zentrum steht somit die Frage, wie sich geldpolitische Maßnahmen der Notenbanken auf gesamtwirtschaftliche Größen übertragen. -- G. Winckler und S. Kaufmann untersuchen in ihrem Beitrag...