On 3 December EY hosted a SUERF conference on banking reform with Sir Howard Davies, the Chairman of RBS, and Dame Colette Bowe, the Chairman of the Banking Standards Board, as the two keynote speakers. Professor David Miles (Imperial College) gave the SUERF 2015 Annual Lecture on Capital and...

Using dynamic factor models and state-space techniques we quantify financial cycles for twenty European countries over the period 1960Q1–2015Q4 capturing imbalances across credit, housing, bond and equity markets. The paper documents the existence of slow-moving and persistent financial cycles...

It is high time we rediscovered the role of the financial cycle in macroeconomics. In the environment that has prevailed for at least three decades now, it is not possible to understand business fluctuations and the corresponding analytical and policy challenges without understanding the...

Five years after the financial crisis, the global economy remains unbalanced and many of the advanced countries are still struggling to return to robust, sustainable growth. Taking a historical perspective, I argue that this predicament reflects a failure to adjust to profound changes in the...

In this paper we compare the Keynesian, neoclassical and Austrian explanations for low interest rates and sluggish growth. From a Keynesian and neoclassical perspective low interest rates are attributed to ageing societies, which save more for the future (global savings glut). Low growth is...

The article starts with a brief description of Mises’ monetary theory, with emphasis on the Misesian differentiation of two kinds of credit: commodity and circulation credit, and with the description of the impact of circulation credit expansion on the business cycle. Further on it is...

We critically review the state of the art in macro stress testing, assessing its strengths and weaknesses. We argue that, given current technology, macro stress tests are ill-suited as early warning devices, ie as tools for identifying vulnerabilities during seemingly tranquil times and for...

The global financial crisis has shaken the foundations of the deceptively comfortable pre-crisis central banking world. Central banks face a threefold challenge: economic, intellectual and institutional. This essay puts forward a compass to help central banks sail in the largely uncharted waters...