This paper seeks to understand the interplay between banks, bank regulation, sovereign default risk and central bank guarantees in a monetary union. I assume that banks can use sovereign bonds for repurchase agreements with a common central bank, and that their sovereign partially backs up any...

Recent developments in many industrialized countries have triggered a debate on whether monetary policy is effective when the nominal interest rate is close to zero. When the nominal interest rate hits its lower bound, the monetary authority is no longer in a position to pursue a policy of...

Serious fiscal vulnerabilities arising from many years of high government/GDP ratios have created new and complex interactions between public debt management and monetary policy. Although their formal mandates have not changed, recent balance sheet policies of many central banks have tended to...