Comment - Monetary policies and financial crisis: Towards a new central banking

Three articles of this special issue evaluate the effects of unconventional monetary policies and the relationships between new capital requirements and bank profitability. These articles present several similarities: two of them draw on individual bank data and not on aggregated data; they highlight the combined consequences of several shocks, by introducing an interaction term between several variables; they conclude to a strong heterogeneity or a heightened magnitude of the effects brought on credit or bank profitability. That comment will underline that if policies of liquidity injections at a time of stress are especially efficient as they draw on widened collaterals, then it is important to keep certain unconventional instruments in the central banks’ toolbox, including outside times of crisis. And if the transmission channels from these policies to lending rates demand close coordination with the fixing of short term interest rates and turn out to have heterogeneous effects due to each banking intermediary’s specific situation, then rates policy must be closely correlated to both microprudential and macroprudential policies.