Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

Successfully managing a course back to normality ("exit") will depend crucially on the central banks' ability to communicate effectively a credible strategy for an orderly exit from such kind of policies. In this context, clear, deliberate, coordinated messages that are anchored in the central...

On 10 January 2013 the ECB Governing Council decided “to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged” based on an assessment of a ‚contained‘ inflationary pressure and a weak economic activity, a contraction of real GDP in second and third quarter of 2012. Similar decisions have been taken...

Successfully managing a course back to normality ("exit") will depend crucially on the central banks' ability to communicate effectively a credible strategy for an orderly exit from such kind of policies. In this context, clear, deliberate, coordinated messages that are anchored in the central...

Helicopter money has once been proposed as a theoretical thought experiment by Milton Friedman in order to elucidate the effect of money injections into the macroeconomy over time. However, some Euro area member states nowadays consider helicopter money, i.e. permanent Quantitative Easing (QE),...

Policymakers in the EU member states are currently shaping rescue packages to prevent the financial crisis hitting their economies with unmitigated force. Each government is responding to the emerging problems with a country-specific set of measures. Given the global nature of the crisis, would...

Die aktuellen Finanzmarktturbulenzen wurden durch Entwicklungen im Immobiliensektor ausgelöst. Vor diesem Hintergrund analysiert dieser Beitrag den Zusammenhang zwischen den Immobilienpreisen und der Geldmengen- und Kreditvolumensentwicklung für den Zeitraum 1992 -2006 (westdeutsche...

We develop a roadmap of how the ECB should further reduce the volume of money (money supply) and roll back credit easing in order to prevent inflation. The exits should be step-by-step rather than one-off. Communicating about the exit strategy must be an integral part of the exit strategy. Price...

The ECB has accepted increasing amounts of rubbish collateral since the crisis started leading to exposure to serious private sector credit risk (i.e. default risk) on its collateralised lending and reverse operations ("repo"). This has led some commentators to argue that the ECB needs "fiscal...