This article looks at the evolution of the Target balance of the Greek central bank. It is shown that in the first 18 months “after Lehman”, lending policy has been relatively lax, contributing to the increase of Target deficits. However, from spring 2010 onwards, there has been a...

Over millennia, mankind has used hard cash in various forms ranging from shells to gold coins and paper. More recently, cash has become unpopular in political circles, as it effectively restricts states’ power to tax (explicitly or via negative interest rates) or to survey and potentially...

In this paper we propose definitions of funding liquidity and funding liquidity risk and present a simple, yet intuitive, measure of funding liquidity risk based on data from open market operations. Our empirical analysis uses a unique data set of 135 main refinancing operation auctions...

Funding liquidity risk has played a key role in all historical banking crises. Nevertheless, a measure based on publicly available data remains so far elusive. We address this gap by showing that aggressive bidding at central bank auctions reveals funding liquidity risk. We can extract an...

In response to the COVID-19 shock, many central banks in emerging market economies have launched local currency bond purchase programmes to address bond market dislocations, signalling that they were willing to take the role of a buyer of last resort. Local currency bond yields fell...