During the past fifteen years, financial markets in Latin America have experienced a major transformation. This process and its effects on the nature of risks and policy challenges in Latin America were the focus of a May 2007 conference in Mexico City sponsored by the Representative Office for...

In most advanced economies, risk-free interest rates – i.e. the rates applicable to assets with minimal credit risk – have fallen to historically low levels over the recent period, in both nominal and real terms. These interest rates are particularly important because they serve as the basis...

In the wake of the two longer-term refinancing operations with a maturity of three years conducted in December 2011 and February 2012, amounts placed on the Eurosystem’s deposit facility surged to unprecedented high levels of around € 800 billion. The article clarifies how this high recourse...

Since the onset of the financial crisis, the Eurosystem has cut interest rates on several occasions and has assumed an increasingly prominent role as a financial intermediary. It stepped up its lending to liquidity-constrained banks and at the same time gave cash-rich banks the opportunity to...

The article addresses recent trends in the financing costs of various public and private sectors in the euro area and Belgium. It pays particular attention to the monetary policy transmission process via the interest rate channel during the crisis and notably examines the extent to which the...

The article examines developments in euro area cross-border capital flows, together with benchmark rates and bank lending rates, and shows that the process of financial integration among euro area countries over the first years of the monetary union went temporarily into reverse, starting in...

The article summarises the main contributions that were presented at the seventh biennial conference organised by the National Bank of Belgium on 11 and 12 October 2012 on the theme “Endogenous Financial Risk” (most of them are available in the NBB Working Paper series, N°s 227 to 236)....

By making simultaneous use of macro-economic data (from the national financial accounts) and micro-economic statistics (from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) and the Central Individual Credit Register), this article takes a closer look at the evolution and distribution of...

The current financial crisis has once again shown that the inherent pro-cyclicality of lending can trigger financial cycles with a potentially substantial impact on the real economy. Against that background, the article analyses the size and dynamics of the debt ratios of the various...

The article examines recent developments in international housing markets and makes an assessment of the current situation. The first section demonstrates that the last upward movement in house prices in advanced economies, that started during the mid-1990s, differed from previous upward phases...