Homeownership among younger households has been decreasing in several major advanced economies. In this analysis, I show that increases in labour income inequality and uncertainty are key drivers of this trend. Confronted with high house prices and low, risky incomes, many young households cannot or do not want to risk making such a big, illiquid investment. As a result, they accumulate less wealth.
The natural rate of interest is the equilibrium real interest rate that is consistent with inflation on target andproduction at full capacity. This article argues that in economies with low natural rates, such as the euroarea today, macroprudential policy can have benefits for the effectiveness of conventional monetarypolicy, in addition to safeguarding financial stability.
The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic led to heightened uncertainty and a “dash-for-cash” in March 2020. Investors moved out of risky assets and into safe assets. The mutual fund sector in particular was hit by unprecedented investor redemptions and faced fire sale pressure as a result. Typically, banks that engage in securities trading – dealer banks – absorb such bond sales, supporting market liquidity, but regulation may limit their ability to do so by requiring them to maintain a certain leverage ratio.
Policy rates in advanced economies are unusually low. What effect does this have on bank stability? I identify two competing effects. On the one hand, low rates harm bank profits by squeezing interest margins. On the other hand, they boost the value of long-term assets held by banks. Using a standard banking model, I determine the policy rate level at which these two forces cancel each other out, i.e. the tipping point. Past this tipping point, the net effect of low rates on bank capital is negative.
Many countries have implemented macroprudential policies. The aims are twofold: first, to render the financial system more resilient to shocks and, second, to prevent booms and busts in the financial system in response to economic cycles. This article provides theoretical and empirical evidence which shows the positive impact that these measures have on financial stability, as well as the gains in economic growth derived from a stronger financial system.
The effect of policy rate cuts on bank lending and risk-taking depends on how the low interest rate environment affects banks’ ability to raise external financing. When interest rates are low, easing monetary policy relaxes banks’ external financing constraint less than when interest rates are high. This reduces the stimulus to bank lending and induces banks to take more risk. There are indeed side effects of monetary stimulus at the zero-lower bound (ZLB).
When considering the use of macroprudential instruments to manage financial imbalances, macroprudential policymakers face an intertemporal trade-off between facilitating short-term expected growth and containing medium-term downside risks to the economy. To assist policymakers in assessing this trade-off, in this article we propose a risk management framework which extends the well-known notion of growth-at-risk to consider the entire predictive real GDP growth distribution, with a view to quantifying the macroprudential policy stance.
Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time. The challenge for policymakers is that climate policies could have a negative impact on the economy in the short term. In this article we discuss how this trade-off between fighting climate change and ensuring a stable business cycle affects the design of environmental policies. We argue in favour of a time-varying carbon tax that is increased during booms and decreased during recessions.
