Presentation on ECB: Monetary Financing, Helicopter Money etc.

PublicPolicy.ie held its second online conference today on “Ireland’s COVID19 Crisis Response: Perspectives from Social Science.”   I gave a talk on a panel titled “EU Dimensions of a Policy Response”.  I mainly discussed the role of the ECB, covering some of more extreme potential measures it could take. I discuss monetary financing, helicopter money and the idea of the Eurosystem selling all its gold and returning the money to governments.

Here are the slides. The video is here.

Briefing Paper on TARGET2 Balances

The Eurosystem’s often-misunderstood TARGET2 balances have again become a topic featured in op-eds and bank briefing documents. I’m posting this a bit late but here is a briefing paper I did on these balances that was submitted to the European Parliament in November 2017.  For those interested in a longer explanation of how the mechanics of how these balances come about, my 2013 paper covers a lot of different issues.