With the crisis in the euro area, the issue of the institutional structure of the monetary union has gained in significance. One problem with regard to the longer-term stability of the euro area is the absence of mechanisms to adequately absorb asymmetric cyclical shocks in the individual member...

The conference will be staged as a court trial in which cash will be accused with three charges: First, cash is an essential part of many kinds of criminal activities; second, it is an inefficient and outdated means of payment; and third, it prevents central banks from implementing optimal...

This paper describes the existing payment system in Indonesia, which is comprised of cash and non-cash payment systems. The non-cash payment system has evolved swiftly due to improvements in information technology and the resulting transition from a paper-based to a card-based system. With the...

This article deals with the macro-economics of the Trans-European Automated Re- al-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System (TARGET2). Originally, the TARGET2 was in-tended to solely function as a monetary arrangement for liquidity issues. It is shown that the TARGET2 contributes to a...

Not since the Great Depression have monetary policy matters and institutions weighed so heavily in commercial, financial, and political arenas. Apart from the eurozone crisis and global monetary policy issues, for nearly two years all else has counted for little more than noise on a relative...

This article deals with the macro-economics of the Trans-European Automated Real-time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System (TARGET2). It is shown that TARGET2 contrib-utes to a misallocation of real resources. The discussion high-lights that there are no tendencies for rebalancing TARGET2...

After decades using monetary aggregates as the main instrument of monetary policy and having different varieties of crawling peg exchange rate regimes, Colombia adopted a full-fledged inflation-targeting (IT) regime in 1999, with inflation as the nominal anchor, a floating exchange rate, and the...

We derive four sets of counterfactual national interest rate paths for the 17 Euro Area countries for the time period 1999 to 2012. They approximate desirable national interest rates countries would have liked to implement if they could still conduct independent monetary policy. We find that...