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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have a profound impact on the lives of high-risk drug users and on the services responding to their needs in at least two important ways: first, through the restrictive measures introduced to mitigate the spread of the virus and, second, as a result of extensive economic downturn. Currently there is great uncertainty as to the future intensity and duration of the pandemic. In addition, the lessons we have been able to learn from previous economic downturns may be of limited applicability to the current situation, which differs in a number of significant respects. Experience nevertheless suggests that the potential consequences for drug users’ health and well-being may be severe. The ongoing uncertainty serves to underline the importance of close monitoring of the drug situation and preparing flexible and innovative solutions to be able to meet new challenges which may arise.

With the spectre of a recession looming in the eurozone (and elsewhere), the policy question arises as to how much leeway do the fiscal authorities in the eurozone have to follow counter-cyclical fiscal policies aimed at providing some stimulus to the economy.

The ECB has announced that when government and corporate bonds come to maturity in the context of its QE-program, new bonds will be bought in the market so as to keep the money stock (money base) unchanged. This creates a “window of opportunities” for the ECB. It could replace the old bonds with new “environmental bonds”, i. e. bonds that have been issued to finance environmental projects. In doing so, the ECB would not create new money. Given the existential nature of the degradation of the environment, including climate change, the priority should be to use the ECB’s money creation capacity towards the support of environmental investments. This can be done without creating inflation. Die EZB hat angekündigt, dass bei Fälligkeit von Staats- und Unternehmensanleihen im Rahmen ihres QE-Programms neue Anleihen am Markt gekauft werden, um die Geldmenge (Geldbasis) unverändert zu halten. Dies schafft ein „Fenster der Möglichkeiten“ für die EZB. Sie könnte die alten Anleihen durch neue „Umweltanleihen“ ersetzen, d. h. Anleihen, die zur Finanzierung von Umweltprojekten ausgegeben wurden. Auf diese Weise würde die EZB kein neues Geld schaffen. Angesichts der existenziellen Bedrohung durch zunehmende Umweltschäden, zu denen auch der Klimawandel gehört, sollte die Priorität darin bestehen, die Geldschöpfungskapazität der EZB zur Unterstützung von Umweltinvestitionen zu nutzen. Dies kann ohne Inflation erfolgen.

This policy brief warns about the risks of discontinuing the policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis by pursuing exit strategies too early and/or too sharply. It outlines a comprehensive strategy for limiting such risks globally and offers an in-depth discussion of the European situation. Due to fiscal rules written in a pre- COVID-19 era and excessive emphasis on controlling public debt ratios, the Euro Area could be left with long-lasting scars, so its situation requires special treatment. Therefore, we articulate some policy proposals designed to preserve and strengthen the recovery in the EMU.

Inflation is on the rise again in the industrialised world. This has led to fears of a sustained surge in inflation. This article argues that while such fears may make sense in the US, they do not in the eurozone, where the monetary-fiscal policy mix has been much less expansionary than in the US. The fear expressed by some that the monetary overhang from the large injections of liquidity through quantitative easing might lead to inflation in the eurozone does not stand up to scrutiny either. The conclusion offers some observations on the monetary operating procedures in the ECB. It argues that in the future, when interest rates rise again, the ECB risks transferring all (and even more) of its profits to the banking system. This article proposes a way to avoid this unacceptable outcome.

We argue that the various proposals aimed at stabilizing the Eurozone using financial engineering do not eliminate the inherent instability of the sovereign bond markets in a monetary union. During crises, this instability becomes systemic and no amount of financial engineering can stabilize an otherwise unstable system. The real stabilization of the Eurozone entails two mechanisms. The first is the willingness of the European Central Bank (ECB) to provide liquidity in the Eurozone sovereign bond markets during times of crisis. The ECB has set up its Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program to do this. However, OMT is loaded with austerity conditions, which will be counterproductive when used during recessions, which is when crises generally occur. That is why a second mechanism is necessary, which consists in creating a Eurozone budget.

ispartof: JCMS-JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES status: published

Sooner or later, the ECB must accept that monetary financing in support of deficit spending is a necessity not just for mitigating the coronavirus crisis, but also for averting a downward deflationary cycle that could pull the eurozone apart.

In this paper, we study the effects of government spending with a behavioral macroeconomic model in which agents have limited cognitive capabilities and use simple heuristics to form their expectations. However, thanks to a learning mechanism, agents can revise their forecasting rule according to its performance. This feature produces endogenous and self-fulfilling waves of optimistic and pessimistic beliefs (animal spirits). This framework allows us to show that the short-run spending multiplier is state dependent. The multiplier is stronger under either extreme optimism or pessimism and reduces in periods of tranquility. Furthermore, the more the central bank focuses on output gap stabilization, the smaller the multiplier. We also show that periods of increasing public debt are characterized by intense pessimism, while intense optimism occurs in periods of decreasing debt. This allows us to show that governments face a trade-off between the stabilization of the animal spirits and the stabilization of public debt. Then, we show that the existence of this trade-off has implications also for the stabilization of the output gap.

Financial crisis could play a key role in changing the policy equilibrium concerning financial markets and institutions. Using a recent comprehensive dataset on financial liberalization across 94 countries for the period between 1973 and 2015, we formally test the validity of this prediction for the member states of the European Union as well as a global sample. We contribute by (a) using a new up-to-date dataset of reforms and crises and (b) subjecting it to a combination of difference-in-differences and local projection estimations. In the global sample, our findings on the causal relationship between crises and liberal reforms consistently point out a negative direction between the two, suggesting that governments react to crises by intervening in financial markets. However, in a dynamic setting with impulse-responses, we also illustrate that such interventions are only temporary and liberalization process restarts after a financial crisis. In the EU sample, however, we do not find sufficient evidence to support either of these observations.

We revisit the fragility of the Eurozone which arises because the sovereigns in the Eurozone issue debt in a currency (the euro) over which they have no control. This prevents them from giving a guarantee to bond holders that they will always be repaid at maturity. This fragility can trigger self-fulfilling liquidity crises, such as those that erupted during 2010-12. We document how this fragility has evolved over time and how it has been affected by the reforms in the governance of the Eurozone since the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-12. This will allow us to analyze the most recent episode that started with the emergence of the pandemic in 2020. The latter has, up to now, not lead to a new debt crisis in the Eurozone, despite the fact that the shock produced by the pandemic was at least as large as the financial crisis of 2007-08. We document how during the pandemic the new governance of the Eurozone prevented this shock from leading to a new sovereign debt crisis. We end with a discussion of the prospects for the future and ask the question of whether the fragility of the Eurozone is a thing of the past.

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. The behavioural model of De Grauwe and Macchiarelli (2015) is extended to include financial frictions on the (aggregate) supply side. The result is a tight and sustained feedback loop between animal spirits on one hand, and supply of credit, capital purchase and production on the other. During phases of optimism, credit is abundant, access to production capital is easy, the cash-in-advance constraint is lax, risks are undervalued, and production is booming. Upon reversal in market sentiment, the contraction is quick and deep. Moreover, the model is capable of replicating the stylized fact of a long and sustained simultaneous growth in credit, production and asset prices observed in the US since mid1990's. Lastly, the behavioural model does a decent job in matching US data including multiple supply-side relations including capital-firm credit and inflation-interest rate. ispartof: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC DYNAMICS & CONTROL vol:91 pages:206-236 status: published