A decade of near-zero, and even negative, interest rates in advanced economies has both encouraged the continued accumulation of debt and a search for yield in riskier assets, while at the same time eroding bank profitability in the retail business. This column discusses some of the palliative measures that central banks have taken to offset the erosion of bank profitability, and raises the question of whether, and how, the longer-term implications of the excessive accretion of debt will be handled.
According to macroeconomic theory, managing inflation expectations is crucial for stabilising the economy. This is particularly true in times of crisis, when the nominal interest rate hits its lower bound. This column provides new evidence from France on how the inflation expectation channel operates in terms of consumer spending. The results suggest that households make consumption decisions based on the broad inflation regime that they expect, rather than with regards to the precise inflation forecast.
In recent years, economic sanctions have increasingly become ‘the tool of choice’ in responses to international political challenges related to geo-political conflicts. But are sanctions successful in achieving their purported objectives? And what are the economic costs of sanctions in a world that is increasingly interconnected with global value-chains and multinational enterprises? This column introduces a new dataset of economic sanctions that covers all bilateral, multilateral, and plurilateral sanctions in the world from 1950 to 2016 that can be utilised to analyse sanctions policies.
From Latin America’s lost decade in the 1980s to the more recent Greek crisis, there are plenty of painful reminders of what happens when countries cannot service their debts. This column argues that a global debt crisis today would likely push millions of people into unemployment and fuel instability and violence around the world, and proposes a multilateral sovereign debt buyback facility which could be managed by the IMF.
Mapping the impact of central bank policy communications onto yield curve changes is important but challenging. This column studies policy communications of the ECB and maps these communications onto yield curve changes by studying the information flow on days when a monetary policy decision is communicated. Using the now publicly available Euro Area Monetary Policy Event-Study Database,it finds that different monetary policy measures affect different segments of the interest rate term structure, with policy rate changes mostly influencing the short end of the curve, quantitative easing measures more the long end, and forward guidance policies affecting intermediate maturities.
Other Recent Columns:
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- The Global Sanctions Data Base
- How to prevent the looming sovereign debt crisis
- Integration and reforms
- Financial market reactions to monetary policy signals
- Population ageing reduces the government spending multiplier
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- Organized crime’s infiltration in legal economy
- Burden of proof: Measuring and understanding crime
- The effectiveness of lockdowns: Learning from the Swedish experience
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