Suchergebnisse

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 economic landscape, which have given rise to the (re-)emergence of major financial booms and busts. The economic developments that really matter now take much longer to unfold – economic time has slowed down relative to calendar time – and yet the planning horizons of economic agents have shortened. The key problems arise from the cumulative effects of past decisions on stocks, and yet these effects are treated as short-term flow issues. The risk is that instability will become entrenched in the system. Policy needs to adjust.

This paper argues that changes in the financial and monetary regimes since the early 1980s may have made it more likely that financial factors in general, and the booms and busts in credit and asset prices in particular, act as drivers of economic fluctuations. As a result, the current environment may be more vulnerable to the occasional build-up of financial imbalances, ie. overextensions in (private sector) balance sheets that herald economic weakness and disinflation down the road, as they unwind, raising also the risk of financial strains and possibly even broader financial instability. Achieving simultaneously monetary and financial stability may call for some significant refinements to current policy frameworks, based on closer cooperation between prudential and monetary authorities. These refinements include a strengthening of the macroprudential orientation of regulatory and supervisory frameworks ensuring that monetary frameworks allow enough room for manoeuvre to lean pre-emptively against the build-up of the imbalances.

This paper sets out a framework for classifying and thinking about unconventional monetary policies, highlighting how they can be viewed within the overall context of monetary policy implementation. The framework clarifies the differences among the various forms of unconventional monetary policy, provides a systematic characterization of the wide range of central bank responses to the recent crisis, helps to underscore the channels of transmission and identifies some of the main policy challenges. In the process, the paper also addresses a number of contentious analytical issues, notably the role of bank reserves and their inflationary consequences.

AbstractThis paper investigates how a prolonged period of low‐interest rates affects bank intermediation activity. We use data for 113 large international banks headquartered in 14 major advanced economies during the period 1994–2015. We find that low‐interest rates induce banks to shift their activities from interest‐generating to fee‐related and trading activities. This rebalancing is stronger for low capitalised banks. Banks also moderately adjust their funding structure, away from short‐term market funding towards deposits. We observe a concomitant decline in the risk‐weighted asset ratio and a reduction in loan‐loss provisions, which is consistent with signs of evergreening.