The sovereign debt crisis has made it clear that central banking is more than keeping inflation low. Central banks are also responsible for financial stability. An essential tool in maintaining financial stability is provided by the capacity of the central bank to be the lender of last resort in...

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...

This note proposes an update to Figure 1 in "Macroeconomic Shocks and their Propagation" in the Handbook of Macroeconomics of 2016 (Ramey, 2016). Figure 1 of Ramey (2016) reports Impulse-Response Functions (IRFs) of variables of interest to a shock in the Federal Funds Rate, following the...

The worldwide financial crisis revealed that some of the basic consensuses concerning the macroeconomic policy framework and the roles of the central banks were no longer tenable. This prompted rethinking of central bank objectives, strategies and policy instruments, with particular focus on the...