Loose financial conditions forecast high output growth and low output volatility up to six quarters into the future, generating time-varying downside risk to the output gap, which we measure by GDP-at-Risk (GaR). This finding is robust across countries, conditioning variables, and time periods....

I examine the conduct of macroprudential policy in an environment where economic indicators move in a cyclical fashion, policy works with a lag, and there are adjustment costs to changing policy. In this setting policy instruments such as the countercyclical capital buffer should be set not only...