Bindseil, Ulrich, Laeven, Luc, (2017), “Confusion about the lender of last resort”, Voxeu, 13 January 2017 The scale and scope of central bank lender of last resort operations during the Global Crisis raised concerns that central banks may be taking excessive risks and supporting moral hazard. This column argues that criticism of such operations is misguided. In the crisis, central banks did not make financial losses when acting as lender of …Read More

Eichengreen, Barry, (2017), “The Age Of Hyper-Uncertainty”, Social Europe, 9 January The year 2017 will mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty. Forty years is a long time, but it is worth looking back and reminding ourselves of how much Galbraith and his readers had to be uncertain about. In 1977, as Galbraith was writing, the world was still reeling from the effects …Read More

Gros, Daniel, (2017), “Can the EU survive in an age of populism?”, CEPS, 9 January Despite the formidable threats currently facing the EU, Daniel Gros offers reassurances that its multi-level democracy and open economy will become more attractive again once the populists fail to deliver and weakened checks and balances lead to excesses. Another year has passed and another threat to the existence of the European Union is looming. The …Read More

Véron, Nicolas, (2017), “ECB finally addressing Italian bank woes”, Bruegel, 4 January Most of Italy’s banks, many of which are small and local, have politicized governance features that blur commercial incentives. As a consequence, they were unable to rein in their lending during the downturn of the late 2000s. Many of these loans turned sour in subsequent years and local connections prevented the banks from working them out, so they …Read More

Skidelsky, Robert, (2016), “Economists versus the Economy”, Project Syndicate, 23 December Let’s be honest: no one knows what is happening in the world economy today. Recovery from the collapse of 2008 has been unexpectedly slow. Are we on the road to full health or mired in “secular stagnation”? Is globalization coming or going? Policymakers don’t know what to do. They press the usual (and unusual) levers and nothing happens. Quantitative …Read More

Forbes, Kristin, Reinhardt, Dennis, Wieladek, Tomasz, (2016), “How the interactions of monetary and regulatory policies may have been ahead of the anti-globalisation backlash”, VoxEu, 23 December Globalisation is in retreat, but while the slowdown in trade is widely recognised, what is more striking is the collapse of global trade flows. This column shows how banking deglobalisation is a substantial contributor to the slowdown in global trade. It finds that certain types …Read More

Muellbauer, John, (2016), “Macroeconomics and consumption: Why central bank models failed and how to repair them”, VoxEu, 21 December The failure of the New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models to capture interactions of finance and the real economy has been widely recognised since the Global Crisis. This column argues that the flaws in these models stem from unrealistic micro-foundations for household behaviour and from wrongly assuming that aggregate behaviour …Read More

Barslund, Mikkel, Busse, Matthias, (2016), “The proposed mobility package may not have much effect on mobility, but what about politics?”, CEPS, 16 December ON TUESDAY OF THIS WEEK, December 13th, the European Commission unveiled its long-awaited second part of the mobility package on the coordination of social security benefits (Regulation 883/2004).[1] While this regulation concerns only a small part of the population in the EU – with the proposed changes affecting …Read More

Azmanova, Albena, (2016), “For A European Political Economy Of Trust”, Social Europe, 14 December The 52 % vote for Brexit united strange bed-fellows: those who wanted less globalisation, and those who wanted more. The former—the ‘losers of globalisation’—charged the EU as guilty of fostering free markets and open borders that threaten (their) livelihoods. For some of the latter, the EU’s bureaucracy has been preventing the UK from being the deregulated, …Read More

Barba Navaretti, Giorgio, Calzolari, Giacomo, Pozzolo, Alberto, (2016), “Bail-in: Limits and work in progress”, VoxEu, 12 December In the years since the Global Crisis, there has been substantial public opposition to taxpayer-funded bailouts of financial institutions. Reflecting this sentiment, a cornerstone of the EU’s post-crisis resolution framework is that losses be borne by private investors and creditors. This column surveys some of the details that need to be worked out …Read More