Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor … regarded as troubled to varying degrees before outright closure. But to our knowledge virtually all studies that predict bank … failures neglect the ordinal nature of bank distress. Exploiting the distress database of the Deutsche Bundesbank we …

price setters to infer the central bank's future policy intentions, thereby making current inflation more responsive to … policy actions. This induces the central bank to pay more attention to inflation rather than output gap stabilization. Then …, transparency may be disadvantageous. It may actually be a policy-distorting straitjacket if the central bank enjoys low …