In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, a consensus rapidly emerged that systemic risk – a central concept in financial stability – needed to be contained going forward. However, to this day experts cannot agree on how to measure systemic risk in the first place, with researchers having proposed a plethora of indicators. This column proposes an analytical approach
John Muellbauer
During the Covid-19 pandemic, central banks have pushed to the extreme the tools they had created after the Global Crisis: targeted lending, large asset purchases, and negative interest rates (Hartmann and Schepens 2021). This is especially true in the euro area. The balance sheet of the ECB amounts to 60% of GDP, it holds around 25% of public debt of the euro area, and the deposit facility rate is at -0.5% (-1% for targeted long-term refinancing operations, or TLTRO). These measures were useful and necessary to avert deflation both during the 2010s and in the Covid-19 crisis. However, since 2015 the annual inflation rate has been around target only 10% of the time (see Figure 1). Based on its June 2021 forecast, the ECB itself anticipates (after a temporary increase in 2021) an average inflation rate below its 2% target at 1.5% in 2022 and 1.4% in 2023.
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