The credit crunch has produced significant volatility in the stock market. This column argues that the wave of uncertainty troubling the markets will likely induce a recession – and render policy instruments powerless to prevent it.

What easy money brought forth in the new century, tight credit will take away in the years to come. Here one of France’s leading economists explains the origins of the subprime crisis and why it is likely to continue to unfold.

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 financial crisis has put the US Federal Reserve’s performance under the spotlight. As the United States reassesses its financial regulatory system, this column makes the case for central bank independence.

In CEPR Policy Insight No.24, Willem Buiter asks: Does it matter if a central bank suffers a large capital loss? Can the central bank become insolvent? How and by whom should the central bank be recapitalised, should its capital be deemed insufficient?

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.

In CEPR Policy Insight No. 23, Axel Leijonhufvud asks not what we have learnt, but what we should have learnt from Keynes in light of the current financial turmoil.

The US Federal Reserve has used unorthodox policy instruments to reduce recent financial turmoil. In this column, the author of CEPR Policy Insight 23 argues that the crisis raises more fundamental questions about core tenets of modern monetary orthodoxy – inflation targeting and central bank independence.

In response to financial turmoil, supervisors are demanding more risk calculations. But model-driven mispricing produced the crisis, and risk models don’t perform during crisis conditions. The belief that a really complicated statistical model must be right is merely foolish sophistication.

A prolonged situation of financial distress, which has now lasted for almost a year, is debilitating the financial system. In CEPR Policy Insight 22, Luigi Spaventa examines possible solutions to the immediate and urgent problems.