IT progress and its application to the financial industry have inspired central banks and academics to analyse the merits of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) accessible to the broad public. This paper first reviews the advantages and risks of such CBDC. It then discusses two prominent...

Open market operations play a key role in allocating central bank funds to the banking system and thereby to steer short-term interest rates in line with the stance of monetary policy. Many central banks apply so-called "fixed rate tender" auctions in their open market operations. This note...

This report summarises the findings of the task force. It is organised as follows. Section 2 starts with a discussion of the relevance of credit risk for central banks. It is followed by a short introduction to credit risk models, parameters and systems in Section 3, focusing on models used by...

The Eurosystem collateral framework (ESCF) has played a key role in the ECB monetary policy implementation since 1999. Moreover, the financial and sovereign debt crisis and with it the increased reliance of banks on central bank credit have underlined the importance of central bank collateral...