Housing booms associated with credit booms are particularly damaging, but the ECB’s one-size-fits-all monetary policy is useless in pricking national bubbles. Euro area governments should use national banking regulations to dampen national bubbles and countercyclical housing taxes to prick bubbles that arise.

The ECB and the Fed are pursuing very different policies on inflation fighting and the use of monetary aggregates in guiding policy. One of Italy’s leading economists argues that either the ECB or the Fed is making a mistake.

Editor's Note: Originally posted 2 June 2008.
There has been a persistent spread between the rate at which banks lend each other money and government-backed securities yields in recent months. This column describes hypotheses explaining the spread – including the possibility that banks aren’t lending in order to bankrupt acquisition targets.

The European Central Bank’s Governing Council continues to expand as new economies adopt the euro. This column presents empirical evidence that the optimal central bank committee size is seven to ten members – far fewer than the 22 members the ECB will have come 2009.

This column, first posted 17 May 2008, reviews Willem Buiter's analysis of why the ECB is so hesitant to buy debt. Central banks can go broke – and some in developing countries have done so recently. The ECB is now lending against dubious collateral. An ECB recapitalisation seems unthinkable at the moment, but that’s why it is a good time to think the unthinkable. Willem Buiter considers the question at length in CEPR Policy Insight No. 24 and argues that Eurozone fiscal authorities should, ASAP, agree on a formula for fiscal burden-sharing should an ECB recapitalisation ever be necessary.

The latest Monitoring the European Central Bank Report argues that the ECB has a serious credibility and communication problem: the way the Governing Council makes its interest rate decisions remains clouded.

The Fed’s policy changes seem nimble compared to the ECB’s. Here one of Europe’s leading analysts of voting mechanisms argues that the ECB’s institutional design accounts for the difference. Forthcoming ECB reforms are unlikely to alleviate the problem.

Central Banking works by guiding the expectations of savers, investors, consumers and markets – not an easy job. This column, based on the latest report in CEPR’s series ‘Monitoring the European Central Bank’, argues that the job would be easier if the ECB published its anticipated interest rate path and voting records.

The European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has created a new economic area, larger and closer with respect to the rest of the world. Area-specific shocks are more important than country-specific, thus it is not surprising the European Central Bank (ECB) use models to study optimal monetary policy in the Euro area assuming it works essentially as a closed economy, hit primarily by domestic shocks. The authors of CEPR DP6654 explore the variable most directly related to current and expected monetary policy, the yield on long-term government bonds, and determine whether the response of long-term rates is consistent with a closed economy.

The ECB’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged lacks transparency and appears inconsistent with the specific policy framework that the ECB itself has decided to embrace. In the current period of great uncertainty, transparency would pay large dividends.