After the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, commercial banks in the United States began accumulating huge cash reserves in their accounts at the Federal Reserve. By the middle of 2011, reserves had reached $1.6 trillion, more than 10 percent of US GDP, an order of magnitude for commercial...

This book, written by an international team of economists, develops concrete, country specific alternatives to inflation targeting, the dominant policy framework of central bank policy that focuses on keeping inflation in the low single digits to the virtual exclusion of other key goals such as...

One aspect of the contemporary crisis of the United States economy has been a sharp increase since the mid-1960s in the reliance on debt finance by corporations, households, and the federal government. This paper focuses on the borrowing behavior of nonfinancial corporations. It first presents...