Eijffinger, Sylvester, (2016), “The ECB Goes Rogue”, Project Syndicate, 18 March The European Central Bank has done it again. At its recent meeting in Frankfurt, the ECB Governing Council decided to increase bond purchases further, from €60 billion ($67 billion) to €80 billion per month, with corporate bonds now also eligible for purchase. The deposit rate, too, was reduced once again, and now stands at -0.4%. This is far from a …Read More

Feld, Lars, P., Schmidt, Christoph, M., Schnabel, Isabel, Wieland, Volker, (2016), “Causes of the Eurozone Crisis: A nuanced view”, Voxeu, 22 March Hindsight is a wonderful thing. In the midst of a crisis, it is of course very hard to understand causality. This column uses the benefit of hindsight to present a nuanced view of the causes of the Eurozone Crisis as seen by members of the German Council of Economic Experts. To …Read More

Eichengreen, Barry, (2016), “Confronting the Fiscal Bogeyman“, Project Syndicate , 11 March The world economy is visibly sinking, and the policymakers who are supposed to be its stewards are tying themselves in knots. Or so suggest the results of the G-20 summit held in Shanghai at the end of last month. The International Monetary Fund, having just downgraded its forecast for global growth, warned the assembled G-20 attendees that yet another downgrade was …Read More

Wolff, Guntram, B., (2016), “The G20’s structural reform agenda should address income gap and financial system fragility”, Bruegel, 15 March Traditional macroeconomic policies have been important in stabilizing the global economy, but they are no longer enough to addressing the fragility and low growth of the current economic environment. In particular, they cannot sustainably address the persistent weakness of demand, let alone drive new productivity growth. Such policies have far more limited ammunition …Read More

Ongena,Steven, Popov, Alexander, van Horen, Neeltje, (2016), “Moral suasion and bond buying in the Eurozone Crisis“, Voxeu, 17 March The European sovereign debt crisis has triggered speculation that part of the increase in banks’ holdings of domestic sovereign debt was driven by ‘moral suasion’ by governments. This column shows that domestic banks in fiscally stressed countries were considerably more likely than foreign banks to increase their holdings of sovereign bonds in those …Read More