Macrofinancial linkages have long been at the core of the IMF's mandate to oversee the stability of the global financial system. With the advent of the economic crisis, the Fund has drawn on this research in order to contribute to critical debates on the nature of appropriate policy responses at both the national and multilateral levels. The current juncture offers a good opportunity to take stock of this body of research by IMF staff and to share it with a wider audience, particularly sin...

The crisis has shifted the policy consensus away from the “benign neglect” view that it is better to pick up the pieces after a bust than try to prevent a real-estate boom in the first place. Yet, a call for a more preventive policy action raises more questions than it provides answers. What kind of indicators should trigger policy intervention to stop or slow down a real estate boom? Even assuming policymakers were fairly certain that intervention were warranted, what would be the policy ...

This paper describes recently established deposit insurance systems, identifying emerging trends. In line with previous IMF work on the subject, it argues against the development of "best practices" applicable to all systems. Rather, it stresses the importance of incorporating each country’s individual objectives in adopting a deposit insurance system, as well as that country’s characteristics, to ensure an effective system that minimizes disincentives and distortions to financial sector i...

This book examines the reasons for the unprecedented weak recovery following the recent US recession and explores the possibility that government economic policy is the problem. Drawing on empirical research that looks at issues from policy uncertainty to increased regulation, the volume offers a broad-based assessment of how government policies are slowing economic growth and provides a framework for understanding how those policies should change to restore prosperity in America.

The April 2014 Global Financial Stability Report finds that, despite much progress, the global financial system remains in a transitional period with stability conditions far from normal. Advanced and emerging market economies alike need to make a successful shift from liquidity- to growth-driven markets, which will require a number of elements, including a normalization of U.S. monetary policy; financial rebalancing in emerging markets; further progress in the euro area integration; and c...

This book happens to be the authors treatise on inflation and his thesis on Inflation Targeting. The book discusses the remedies for inflation in general and inflation targeting in particular.

Prominent economists reconsider the fundamentals of economic policy for a post-crisis world.In 2011, the International Monetary Fund invited prominent economists and economic policymakers to consider the brave new world of the post-crisis global economy. The result is a book that captures the state of macroeconomic thinking at a transformational moment.The crisis and the weak recovery that has followed raise fundamental questions concerning macroeconomics a...

In this highly original piece of work, Steven D. Gjerstad and Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith analyze the role of housing and its associated mortgage financing as a key element of economic cycles. The authors combine data from both laboratory and real markets to provide insight into the bubble propensity of real-world economic actors and use novel historical analysis on the Great Recession, the Great Depression, and all of the post-World War II recessions to establish the critical roles of ...

Japan’s weak economic performance in the 1990s has had implications not only for its own people, but for the world economy more generally, given Japan’s importance as a trading partner and supplier of capital. Therefore, it is essential that Japan unlock its growth potential. The IMF has worked with the Japanese authorities to identify the policies needed to bring Japan’s economy out of its recent slump. This book contributes to this ongoing debate, whose major topics include the need for an ...

What caused Asia's largest economy, once the envy of the world, to lag behind many of the other industrial countries? And why did it take so long for Japan to recover from the bursting of its asset price bubble of the late 1980s? In this volume, a team from the International Monetary Fund examines the causes of the lingering economic problems of Japan, the crisis in its banking system, the reasons for weak business investment, and the government's efforts to kick-start the economy through a s...