In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled the reserve requirements imposed on member banks. Ever since, the question of whether the doubling of reserve requirements increased reserve demand and produced a contraction of money and credit, and thereby helped to cause the recession of 1937-1938, has...

The handling of cross-border banks in difficulties gives rise to coordination problems between home and host countries. Goodhart and Schoenmaker (2006, 2009) have suggested to implement an ex ante burden sharing mechanism to overcome the co-ordination failure of national authorities. While...

The author covers the Northern Rock affair and the subsequent instability in the UK financial system in the context of the history and desired future role of the Bank of England as a central bank. Tim Congdon, a respected monetary economist, shows how the Bank of England failed in its duties to...

Since July 2007 the world economy has experienced a severe financial crisis originating in the U.S. housing market. The crisis has subsequently spread to the financial sectors in European and Asian economies and led to a severe worldwide recession. The existing literature on financial crises...

During the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve implemented a series of extraordinary and unconventional policies to alleviate the impact of the crisis on financial markets and the economy. In this paper, we examine the effects of these policies on broad financial market conditions,...

This Article considers the scope of the Federal Reserve's emergency loan-making powers and analyzes their use during the recent financial crisis. It argues that many of the Fed's responses to the crisis exceeded the bounds of its statutory authority.In unusual and exigent circumstances, § 13(3)...

Over the past decade policy makers in Latin America have adopted a number of macroprudential instruments to manage the procyclicality of bank credit dynamics to the private sector and contain systemic risk. Reserve requirements, in particular, have been actively employed. Despite their...

Numerous commentaries have questioned both the legality and appropriateness of Federal Reserve lending to banks during the recent financial crisis. This article addresses two questions motivated by such commentary: 1) Did the Federal Reserve violate either the letter or spirit of the law by...

The Euro area economic activity and banking sector have shown substantial fragility over the last years with remarkable country heterogeneity. Using detailed data on lending conditions and standards, we analyse how financial fragility has affected the transmission mechanism of the single Euro...

At the heart of the eurozone crisis lies the inability of the current monetary policy framework to avert the on-going financial disintegration and to break the vicious circle that ties up banks and governments in a death grip (liquidity ring-fencing), which does not allow policies to deal...