In the annual lecture he presented, the 1st of June 2023, as part of the SCOR-PSE "Risk and Macroeconomics" chair, Olivier Jeanne, professor at the John Hopkins Department of Economics, wondered whether central banks should backstop government debt by practicing a "financial repression".

His conclusion is that financial repression significantly reduces the probability of governments defaulting, but at significantly higher debt levels. On the other hand, entirely ruling out financial repression leads to an equilibrium with frequent defaults at lower debt levels. However, financial repression goes hand in hand with higher inflation and its optimal mix is more difficult to achieve in a monetary union like the eurozone.

Biography

Olivier Jeanne

He joined the Johns Hopkins Department of Economics in September, 2008, after ten years in various positions at the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. His research spans an array of applied and theoretical topics in international and domestic macroeconomics: capital flows, exchange rate regimes and currency crises, sovereign debt and defaults, international liquidity, and monetary policy. Outside of Hopkins, he is also a research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, Cambridge MA), a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London), and a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Washington, D.C.).