In response to the economic crisis of 2008 and the debt crises of some Eurozone countries, central banks began expansionary monetary policies, which became a massive injection of resources through the purchase of assets known as Quantitative Easing. The European Central Bank (ECB) took a step...

In this paper we empirically analyze the determinants of bank default risk (measured by the banks' CDS spreads) for European banks during the period 2008-2018. We examine the effect of (1) bank business model characteristics, (2) sovereign default risk and (3) ECB monetary policy. We disentangle...

In the evolution of money, the advent of cryptocurrencies would have been an inevitable and a natural phenomenon, but the farfetched implications of the 2008 global credit mayhem only accelerated their arrival. Facebook's claim of the Libra Blockchain as a decentralized network is far from...

This paper relates Keynes's discussions of money, the state theory of money, financial markets, investors' expectations, uncertainty, and liquidity preference to the dynamics of government bond yields for countries with monetary sovereignty. Keynes argued that the central bank can influence the...

The prolonged crisis exposed the vulnerability of a monetary union without a banking union. The Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), which started operating in November 2014, is an essential step towards restoring banks to health and rebuilding trust in the banking system. The ECB is today...

This occasional paper describes how the financial stability and macroprudential policy functions are organised at the ECB. Financial stability has been a key policy function of the ECB since its inception. Macroprudential policy tasks were later conferred on the ECB by the Single Supervisory...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

This paper analyses the issue of the dynamics of the TARGET2 system balances during the sovereign debt crisis, when some countries registered a decisive inflow of the central bank liquidity and others showed an outflow. The dynamics in the TARGET2 are here explained as being due to a fall in the...

The present paper contains a brief presentation and analysis, in a historical perspective through the lens of the recent major crises, of the legal framework governing the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), as well as current developments and challenges ahead. It is structured in three...

This paper provides a chronology of the main financial events over the last 15 years, spanning three main crises. The first is the global financial crisis in 2008-09, and the second is the euro area sovereign debt crisis in 2010-12. Both events heralded significant reforms of the EU's governance...