Gaspar, Vitor, Moreno Badia, Marialuz, (2016), “Big Bad Actors: A Global View of Debt”, iMF Direct, 5 Οκτωβρίου In the midst of the Great Depression, the American economist Irving Fisher warned of the dangers of excessive debt and the deflationary pressures that follow on its tail. He saw debt and deflation as the big, bad actors. Now, their close relatives—too high debt and too low inflation—are still in play, at …Read More

Graham, Carol, (2016), “GDP growth — is it “good enough” or does it distort policymaking?”, Brookings, 5 Οκτωβρίου Today, standard benchmarks of progress, productivity, job quality, and democracy are being upended. Income-based measures such as gross domestic product (GDP) served us well for decades, yet when GDP counts pollutant-generating economic activity on the positive side of the balance sheet, or when it fails to measure unpaid labor activity, it falls short. …Read More

Shen, Dennis, (2016), “Central banks are facing a crisis of confidence – it’s time to reinvent global monetary policy”, LSE Europpblog, 6 Οκτωβρίου Since the financial crisis, central banks have taken on a far more significant role in economic management. But with diminishing returns of and unintended consequences from existing policies, monetary policy now faces a crisis of confidence. Dennis Shen explores policy innovations that could support global central banks battling …Read More

Scheubel, Beatrice, Stracca, Livio, (2016), “What we really know about the global financial safety net”, VoxEu, 4 Οκτωβρίου The global financial safety net is one of the key infrastructures of financial globalization. However, its current constellation does not reflect a coherent design, but rather the interaction of different instruments used for different purposes and developed over time. This column presents the first database that brings together all of the relevant …Read More

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, (2016), “What Deutsche Bank’s Troubles Tell Us about the Health of Europe’s Banking System”, Peterson Institute for International Economics, 30 Σεπτεμβρίου The stock of Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, is currently trading at multi-decade lows and the bank is edging closer to suffering a general crisis of confidence, which could see investors pull their business from the bank and even depositors wanting their money out. We are not …Read More