The development of Asian foreign exchange markets has progressed appreciably in recent years. Data from the BIS Triennial Central Bank Survey indicate that the turnover of Asian currencies rose sharply between 2004 and 2007, financial institutions became more important customers, and the...

We analyse the turnover of fixed income derivatives in seven currencies to test the hypothesis that market participants increasingly use contracts based on private rather than government rates to hedge and to take positions. In the US dollar money market, private benchmarks long ago displaced...

In recent years, a number of structural developments have had a significant influence on thefunctioning of financial markets. The most important of these developments are the introduction of theeuro, the spread of electronic trading, shifts in the constellation and behaviour of market...

It is widely acknowledged that the recent generation of DSGE models failed to incorporate many of the liquidity and financial accelerator mechanisms revealed in the global financial crisis that began in 2007. This paper complements the papers presented at the 2009 BIS annual conference focused...

Is there any need to “clean” up a banking system in the midst of a crisis, by closing or recapitalizing weak banks and taking bad assets off bank balance sheets, or can one wait till the crisis is over? We argue that an “overhang” of impaired banks that may be forced to sell assets soon...

Securitization was meant to disperse credit risk to those who were better able to bear it. In practice, securitization appears to have concentrated the risks in the financial intermediary sector itself. This paper outlines an accounting framework for the financial system for assessing the impact...

The recent crisis was characterized by massive illiquidity. This paper reviews what we know and don't know about illiquidity and all its friends: market freezes, fire sales, contagion, and ultimately insolvencies and bailouts. It first explains why liquidity cannot easily be apprehended through...

I explain the key failure mechanics of large dealer banks, and some policy implications. This is not a review of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. Systemic risk is considered only in passing. Both the financial crisis and the systemic...

Since the start of the financial crisis, industrial country public debt levels have increased dramatically. And they are set to continue rising for the foreseeable future. A number of countries face the prospect of large and rising future costs related to the ageing of their populations. In this...

Die Governance der Zentralbanken hat zwei Dimensionen: Corporate Governance und Public Governance. Public Governance ist ein institutioneller Rahmen, wobei die breite Öffentlichkeit eine Zentralbank regelt durch und durch die Legislative und Exekutive in einem Land. Dieses Papier argumentiert,...