Recommended lectures: Global economy

1. Economic Conditions Snapshot, June 2017: McKinsey Global Survey results. Global executives see geopolitical issues as a rising risk to growth, but they remain more buoyant than downbeat in their outlook for both the global and domestic economies (McKinsey).
2. Excess saving and low interest rates: Assessing theory and evidence from the Global Crisis. There is a broad consensus that the global decline in real interest rates can be explained with a higher propensity to save, above all due to demographic reasons. This column argues that this view relies on a commodity theory of finance, which is inadequate for analysis of real world phenomena. In a monetary theory of finance, household saving does not release funds for investment, it simply redistributes existing funds. In addition, the column shows that at the global level, the gross household saving rate has declined since the 1980s, as well as net saving rates (VOX).
3. A new database for financial crises in European countries. This paper presents a new database for financial crises in European countries, which serves as an important step towards establishing a common ground for macroprudential oversight and policymaking in the EU. The database focuses on providing precise chronological definitions of crisis periods to support the calibration of models in macroprudential analysis. An important contribution of this work is the identification of financial crises by combining a quantitative approach based on a financial stress index with expert judgement from national and European authorities. Key innovations of this database are (i) the inclusion of qualitative information about events and policy responses, (ii) the introduction of a broad set of non-exclusive categories to classify events, and (iii) a distinction between event and post-event adjustment periods. The paper explains the two-step approach for identifying crises and other key choices in the construction of the dataset. Moreover, stylised facts about the systemic crises in the dataset are presented together with estimations of output losses and fiscal costs associated with these crises. A preliminary assessment of the performance of standard early warning indicators based on the new crises dataset confirms findings in the literature that multivariate models can improve compared to univariate signalling models (European Systemic Risk Board).