The Central Bank as Crisis Manager

The world’s central banks have confronted crisis after crisis in recent years—both before and since the global financial crisis. Yet many of these events seem to take central banks by surprise, obliging them to improvise. In this important study, Patrick Honohan, former governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, calls on central banks to make preparation for crisis management a core activity. They should be ready to deal with the unexpected. Departing from the rather sedate mode of operation appropriate to their normal focus on price stability and risk control, they must speed up their decision making, change their style of communication, and be more open to cooperation with governments when a crisis hits. They need to keep careful track of changing financial market practices, evaluating solvency in murky situations and quickly weighing the tradeoffs involved in measures that can help contain the crisis but have adverse side effects. The Central Bank as Crisis Manager warns that failure to recognize these challenges could be costly for society.