Fighting Inflation More Effectively Without Transferring Central Banks' Profits to Banks
In: CESifo Working Paper No. 10741
In: CESifo Working Paper No. 10741
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We revisit the fragility of the Eurozone which arises because the sovereigns in the Eurozone issue debt in a currency (the euro) over which they have no control. This prevents them from giving a guarantee to bond holders that they will always be repaid at maturity. This fragility can trigger self-fulfilling liquidity crises, such as those that erupted during 2010–12. We document how this fragility has evolved over time and how it has been affected by the reforms in the governance of the Eurozone since the sovereign debt crisis of 2010–12. This will allow us to analyze the most recent episode that started with the emergence of the pandemic in 2020. The latter has, up to now, not led to a new debt crisis in the Eurozone, despite the fact that the shock produced by the pandemic was at least as large as the financial crisis of 2007–08. We document how during the pandemic the new governance of the Eurozone prevented this shock from leading to a new sovereign debt crisis. We end with a discussion of the prospects for the future and ask the question of whether the fragility of the Eurozone is a thing of the past.
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Inflation is on the rise again in the industrialised world. This has led to fears of a sustained surge in inflation. This article argues that while such fears may make sense in the US, they do not in the eurozone, where the monetary-fiscal policy mix has been much less expansionary than in the US. The fear expressed by some that the monetary overhang from the large injections of liquidity through quantitative easing might lead to inflation in the eurozone does not stand up to scrutiny either. The conclusion offers some observations on the monetary operating procedures in the ECB. It argues that in the future, when interest rates rise again, the ECB risks transferring all (and even more) of its profits to the banking system. This article proposes a way to avoid this unacceptable outcome.
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In: CESifo Working Paper No. 8853
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In: CESifo Working Paper No. 9131
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We first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by both public and private interests. Using a novel dataset covering 94 countries between 1973 and 2015, we then establish that financial crises can lead to government interventions in financial markets. Consistent with a public interest channel, we find post-crisis interventions occur only in democratic countries. However, by using a plausibly exogenous setting -i.e., term limits- muting political accountability, we show that democratic leaders who do not have re-election concerns are substantially more likely to intervene in financial markets after crises, in ways that may promote (obstruct) private (public) interests.
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We first present a simple model of post-crisis policymaking driven by both public and private interests. Using a novel dataset covering 94 countries between 1973 and 2015, we then establish that financial crises can lead to government interventions in financial markets. Consistent with a public interest channel, we find post-crisis interventions occur only in democratic countries. However, by using a plausibly exogenous setting -i.e., term limits- muting political accountability, we show that democratic leaders who do not have re-election concerns are substantially more likely to intervene in financial markets after crises, in ways that may promote (obstruct) private (public) interests.
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In: University of Milan Bicocca Department of Economics, Management and Statistics Working Paper No. 484
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In: CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP14540
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In this paper, we study the effects of government spending with a behavioral macroeconomic model in which agents have limited cognitive capabilities and use simple heuristics to form their expectations. However, thanks to a learning mechanism, agents can revise their forecasting rule according to its performance. This feature produces endogenous and self-fulfilling waves of optimistic and pessimistic beliefs (animal spirits). This framework allows us to show that the short-run spending multiplier is state dependent. The multiplier is stronger under either extreme optimism or pessimism and reduces in periods of tranquility. Furthermore, the more the central bank focuses on output gap stabilization, the smaller the multiplier. We also show that periods of increasing public debt are characterized by intense pessimism, while intense optimism occurs in periods of decreasing debt. This allows us to show that governments face a trade-off between the stabilization of the animal spirits and the stabilization of public debt. Then, we show that the existence of this trade-off has implications also for the stabilization of the output gap.
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In: Journal of common market studies: JCMS, Band 58, Heft S1
ISSN: 1468-5965
"The objective of this book is to put forward a comprehensive, detailed, yet critical assessment of the state of the art in this burgeoning literature. The book will cover most recent work related to economic impacts of structural reforms on growth (recovery), unemployment, investment, imbalances and inequality in the background of the 2007 financial crisis in Europe. This volume has a collection of chapters that show the progress made in this field: new theoretical framework, new data and new empirical methodologies. These are also discussed and illustrated by several case studies of countries that introduced significant reforms"--
In: CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP15413
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