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Working Paper
The international monetary and financial system: a capital account historical perspective
In analysing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when financial markets are highly segmented. But it is badly inadequate when they are closely integrated, as they have been most of the time since at least the second half of the 19th century. Zeroing on the capital account shifts the focus from the goods markets to asset markets and balance sheets. Seen ...
Conference Paper
Macroprudential policies in open emerging economies
Conference Paper
Financial intermediaries, financial stability and monetary policy
Conference Paper
Commentary : has financial development made the world riskier?
Journal Article
Banking, Regulation, and Macroeconomic Outcomes
In October 2024, the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis organized the first event in the Macroeconomic Policy Perspectives conference series, “Banking, Regulation, and Macroeconomic Outcomes.” In what follows, we present the remarks made by Douglas Diamond, Andrea Eisfeldt, and Hyun Song Shin at the Policy Roundtable of the conference.
Journal Article
Liquidity, monetary policy, and financial cycles
A close look at how financial intermediaries manage their balance sheets suggests that these institutions raise their leverage during asset price booms and lower it during downturns - pro-cyclical actions that tend to exaggerate the fluctuations of the financial cycle. The authors of this study argue that the growth rate of aggregate balance sheets may be the most fitting measure of liquidity in a market-based financial system. Moreover, the authors show a strong correlation between balance sheet growth and the easing and tightening of monetary policy.
Report
Financial intermediation, asset prices, and macroeconomic dynamics
Fluctuations in the aggregate balance sheets of financial intermediaries provide a window on the joint determination of asset prices and macroeconomic aggregates. We document that financial intermediary balance sheets contain strong predictive power for future excess returns on a broad set of equity, corporate, and Treasury bond portfolios. We also show that the same intermediary variables that predict excess returns forecast real economic activity and various measures of inflation. Our findings point to the importance of financing frictions in macroeconomic dynamics and provide quantitative ...
Report
Monetary cycles, financial cycles, and the business cycle
One of the most robust stylized facts in macroeconomics is the forecasting power of the term spread for future real activity. The economic rationale for this forecasting power usually appeals to expectations of future interest rates, which affect the slope of the term structure. In this paper, we propose a possible causal mechanism for the forecasting power of the term spread, deriving from the balance sheet management of financial intermediaries. When monetary tightening is associated with a flattening of the term spread, it reduces net interest margin, which in turn makes lending less ...