This paper contributes to the literature on liquidity crises and central banks acting as lenders of last resort by capturing the mechanics of dual liquidity crises, i.e. funding crises which encompass both the private and the public sector, within a closed system of financial accounts. We...

Deposit outflows and a decrease of interbank funding have been compensated by increased borrowing of Greek banks to the Eurosystem. Due to collateral eligibility constraints, most of this funding shifted to ELA. The ECB could raise the haircut rates on the collateral pledged by Greek banks to...

We describe the evolution of balance sheets of monetary financial institutions (MFI) in Portugal before, during, and after the sovereign debt crisis of the late 2000's. We account for several dimensions of heterogeneity including size, type, and nationality. We find that the Portuguese MFI...

Three models of a monetary economy are considered, in order to show the effects of a gold demonetization: the first with a gold money, the second with demonetized gold but no central bank, and the third with demonetized gold, but with a central bank. The distinctions between ownership and...

President George W. Bush famously remarked in July 2008 that during the housing boom “Wall Street got drunk... and now it has a hangover.” It was the Federal Reserve that spiked the punchbowl. The Fed sowed the seeds for the bust of 2007-08 by overexpanding credit, keeping interest rates too...

Under the classical gold standard (1880-1914), the Bank of France maintained a stable discount rate while the Bank of England changed its rate very frequently. Why did the policies of these central banks, the two pillars of the gold standard, differ so much? How did the Bank of France manage to...

This paper aims to make two contributions: to review the ECB’s non-standard monetary policy measures in response to the financial and sovereign debt crisis against the background of the institutional framework and financial structure of the euro area; and to interpret this response from a...

The aim of the present article is twofold. Firstly, to put the German Federal Constitutional Court (i.e., the BverfG ) judgment into the context of a drawn-out conflict between the German Republic and the European Union regarding the setting up of a crisis management tool in the area of monetary...

“Has anyone bothered to study the cumulative effect of all these things?” the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase reasonably inquired of the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at a bankers gathering in Atlanta last June. The CEO, Jamie Dimon, was referring to the combination of...

At the heart of the eurozone crisis lies the inability of the current monetary policy framework to avert the on-going financial disintegration and to break the vicious circle that ties up banks and governments in a death grip (liquidity ring-fencing), which does not allow policies to deal...