The new bail-in doctrine: A recipe for banking crises and depression in the eurozone. CEPS Commentary

This Commentary argues that the failure to recognise shared responsibility for the banking crisis in Cyprus has led to the imposition of a bail-in template that increases the risk of banking crises and economic depression in the eurozone

Why should we believe the market this time? ECMI Commentary No. 22, 23 February 2009

During the decade preceding the eruption of the financial crisis in August 2007, rating agencies and market participants, gripped by euphoria, systematically underestimated the risk inherent in a wide range of financial assets. Today the panic that has gripped them leads to an equally distorted view of the risks involved. Private debt is dumped in favour of government debt of just a few countries. How these countries are selected is unclear. This selection mechanism is the result of an emotional reaction that leads market participants to believe that “it is inconceivable that serious countries like the US, Germany or France would ever default on their debt” while other countries are deemed to be to be capable of doing such a bad thing. These emotional reactions create distortions that affect economic activity in profound ways

Stock Prices and Monetary Policy. CEPS Working Document No. 304, September 2008

The question of whether central banks should target stock prices so as to prevent bubbles and crashes from occurring has been hotly debated. This paper analyses this question using a behavioural macroeconomic model. This model generates bubbles and crashes. It analyses how ‘leaning against the wind’ strategies, which aim to reduce the volatility of stock prices, can help in reducing volatility of output and inflation. We find that such policies can be effective in reducing macroeconomic volatility, thereby improving the trade-off between output and inflation variability. The strength of this result, however, depends on the degree of credibility of the inflation-targeting regime. In the absence of such credibility, policies aiming at stabilising stock prices do not stabilise output and inflation

The Dilemma of the Dollar. CEPS Commentaries, 26 November 2009

Even more spectacular than the recent decline of the dollar against major world currencies has been the long-run decline of the US currency: since 1960 the dollar has lost two-thirds of its value against the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc and the German mark (since 1999, the euro). At the same time, however, at least since the early 1990s, the US has been seen to produce superior economic results, i.e. a higher productivity growth than most of Europe and Japan with more or less the same rates of inflation. In this Commentary, CEPS Associate Senior Fellow Paul De Grauwe attempts to explain this paradox

Design failures in the Eurozone: can they be fixed?

I analyse the nature of the design failures of the Eurozone. I argue first that the endogenous dynamics of booms and busts that are endemic in capitalism continued to work at the national level in the Eurozone and that the monetary union in no way disciplined these into a union-wide dynamics. On the contrary the monetary union probably exacerbated these national booms and busts. Second, the existing stabilizers that existed at the national level prior to the start of the union were stripped away from the member-states without being transposed at the monetary union level. This left the member states “naked” and fragile, unable to deal with the coming national disturbances. I study the way these failures can be overcome. This leads me to stress the role of the ECB as a lender of last resort and the need to make macroeconomic policies more symmetric so as to avoid a deflationary bias in the Eurozone. I conclude with some thoughts on political unification

Should central banks target stock prices? CEPS Policy Briefs. No. 171, 23 September 2008

This paper, which draws on a longer, more analytical Working Document by the same author (No. 304/September 2008), explores the question of whether central banks should target stock prices so as to prevent bubbles and crashes from occurring. It analyses how ‘leaning against the wind’ strategies, which aim to reduce the volatility of stock prices, can help in reducing volatility of output and inflation. Its finds, however, that a critical element in the success in such a strategy is the degree of credibility of the inflation-targeting regime. In the absence of such credibility, policies aiming at stabilising stock prices do not stabilise output and inflation. Paul De Grauwe is Professor of Economics at the University of Leuven and Associate Senior Fellow at CEPS

Financial deregulation in developing countries.

Country; Developing countries;

Macroeconomic modeling when agents are imperfectly informed

DSGE-models have become important tools of analysis not only in academia but increasingly in the board rooms of central banks. The success of these models has much to do with the coherence of the intellectual framework it provides. The limitations of these models come from the fact that they make very strong assumptions about the cognitive abilities of agents in understanding the underlying model. In this paper we relax this strong assumption. We develop a stylized DSGEmodel in which individuals use simple rules of thumb (heuristics) to forecast the future inflation and output gap. We compare this model with the rational expectations version of the same underlying model. We find that the dynamics predicted by the heuristic model differs from the rational expectations version in some important respects, in particular in their capacity to produce endogenous economic cycles.DSGE-model, imperfect information, heuristics, animal spirits

European employment: A tale of demand and supply.

Demand; Employment;