Economic activity has slowed sharply as a result of the outbreak of coronavirus, the measures to contain the infection and the resulting behavioural changes. A favourable starting point for the Danish economy improves its ability to deal with the economic consequences of the crisis. Danmarks Nationalbank supports the relief packages, which will temporarily help sustain employment and businesses, but more traditional fiscal stimulus may be needed going forward. Public debt will grow as a result of the downturn and relief packages, but there is room for that. For 2020 as a whole, real GDP growth is estimated to be between -3 and -10 per cent. (This publication is a translation of the analysis published 1 April 2020 in Danish only).

Monetary policy interest rates are negative in a number of countries, including Denmark. Concern has been expressed that negative rates may, in some cases, have had undesirable effects on bank lending rates. In Denmark, pass-through to bank lending rates remains positive, and there are no indications to suggest that negative rates have weakened bank lending. The pass-through of monetary policy interest rates to bank lending rates slowed around the financial crisis, driven primarily by the banks with the highest risk exposure before the crisis.

Monetary policy rates are negative in a number of countries, including Denmark. Concern has been expressed that negative rates may, in some cases, have had undesirable effects on bank lending rates. We show that in Denmark, pass-through to bank lending rates remains positive, and we do not find indications to suggest that negative rates have weakened bank lending. The pass-through of monetary policy interest rates to bank lending rates slowed around the financial crisis, and we show that this is driven primarily by the banks with the highest risk exposure before the crisis.

Danmarks Nationalbank's accounts for 2019 show a profit of kr. 6,096 million, compared with a loss of kr. 24 million in 2018. Both the gold stock, equity exposure and bond holdings contributed significantly to the result for the year. This report is based on information available up to 7 March 2020.

The euro area economy and its financial sector remains disproportionately more vulnerable to shocks originating from the US than in reverse, as demonstrated in a brand-new international study with data spanning four decades. In an original empirical study, Eddie Gerba from Danmarks Nationalbank and Danilo Leiva-Leon from Banco de España have analysed and compared the interaction between the financial sector and the macroeconomy in the US and the euro area over the past four decades.

We measure the time-varying strength of macro-financial linkages within and across the US and euro area economies. The main results show that the euro area is disproportionately more sensitive to shocks in the US macroeconomy and financial sector. Moreover, while macro-financial interactions have steadily increased in the euro area since the late 1980s, they have oscillated in the US, exhibiting very long cycles of macro-financial interdependence.

Was the fall in the level and volatility of inflation over the last 30 years the result of good luck, or good monetary policy? We assess the inflation experience of Canada, an early adopter of an inflation targeting policy. Good luck explains only a minor portion of the changes in inflation after the shift in policy. Most of inflation and output stabilization is explained by the impact on expectations.

Over recent years, low bond yields and low expected returns on other assets have prompted insurance companies and pension funds (I&P companies) to continue investing more pension savers’ funds in unlisted assets such as wind farms, infrastructure, forestry, unlisted enterprises, private equity funds, properties and alternative types of debt. For the first time, newly developed statistics from Danmarks Nationalbank provide a comprehensive overview of this important development.

Before the financial crisis, investors typically expected an annual return on equities of around 7 per cent, while the return on 10-year treasury bonds was around 4 per cent. Today, the return on 10-year treasury bonds is close to zero, while investors still expect a return of around 7 per cent when investing in equities. The risk premium for investing in the equity market rather than safe assets such as government bonds has thus doubled since the start of the financial crisis more than 10 years ago.

Economic Memo is a new publication series from Danmarks Nationalbank. Please, update your News service settings if you want to receive a notification when the next Economic Memo is available. The first Economic Memo shows that the equity risk premium has doubled after the financial crisis. As a result, financing costs of corporations declined less than monetary policy rates. The memo looks into explanations behind the higher premium.

Danmarks Nationalbank has conducted a survey of the Danish households' use of cash. According to the survey, more and more Danes opt out of using cash as a means of payment, and there is considerable evidence that this trend will continue in the future. However, an entirely cashless society is not envisaged in the foreseeable future.

Interest-only mortgages are very popular in Denmark, currently making up 45 per cent of outstanding mortgage volumes. These loans allow homeowners to postpone repayment on the mortgage principal - typically for up to 10 years after origination - reducing monthly instalments for a period of time. A small share of borrowers need to cut spending in order to fund the rise in mortgage instalments when the 10 year amortization-free period ends. This analysis show that the reduction in expenditure is substantial for the affected homeowners but the overall effect on the Danish economy is very limited.

Denmark's central government debt amounted to 18 per cent of GDP at the end of 2019. The debt has decreased considerably since 2012, when it peaked after the financial crisis. The central government's financing requirement was met at record-low yields in 2019. The central government issued nominal bonds at an average yield to maturity of -0.33 per cent p.a. and an average maturity of 8 years. Interest costs on the central government debt totalled 0.6 per cent of GDP. In 2019, the central government purchased all the bonds issued for financing social housing. Since early 2018, the central government has purchased bonds for almost kr. 95 billion at market value.

It is typically assumed within corporate default modeling that the covariates have a linear effect on the log-hazard scale, no interactions, and that there is only a single additive latent factor on the log-hazard scale. Using a sample of US corporate firms, we show in this paper that these standard assumptions are too strict and that they matter in practice. We propose instead a frailty-model that relaxes these assumptions and takes into account time-varying covariates, while being able to provide forecasts for arbitrary portfolios.

Danish authorities have implemented a number of regulations targeting mortgage financing. The new regulations provide incentives for the most indebted homeowners to increase amortization on their mortgages thereby increasing the robustness of the housing market. As the new rules have been implemented, mortgage credit institutions have managed to increase their issuance of new mortgages to first time buyers as well as older existing home owners remortgaging.

Homeowners’ with interest-only mortgages reduce consumption by an average of 3 per cent of income when amortisation starts if they are unable to roll over their interest-only loans into new ones as they might have expected to do. This corresponds to a reduction in expenditure of kr. 14,000 per homeowner per year. This appears from a Working Paper prepared by Henrik Yde Andersen, Senior Economist, Alessia De Stefani, Research Economist and Stine Ludvig Bech, Senior Economist.

We study how homeowners’ consumption responds to the beginning of the amortization period on interest-only mortgages. In response to an average increase in mortgage instalments worth 9 per cent of annual income, consumption drops by 3 percent of income, in the year when amortization starts. This expenditure cut is persistent, but only affects a small subset of borrowers with high leverage ratios. These borrowers might have been unable to rollover their interest-only loans into new ones.

We show that systemic risk in the banking sector breeds macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a model of a production economy with a banking sector where financial constraints of banks can lead to disastrous banking panics. We find that a higher probability of a banking panic increases uncertainty in the aggregate economy. We explore the implications of this banking panic-driven uncertainty for business cycles, asset prices and macroprudential regulation. Banking panic-driven uncertainty amplifies business cycle volatility and increases risk premia on asset prices. A countercyclical capital buffer lowers both the probability of banking panics and aggregate uncertainty.

Weak firms, "zombies", account for less than 1.5 per cent of Danish firms, which is low compared with other countries. Interest rates have been falling for several years, but the risk of remaining a zombie has not increased. This indicates that lower interest rates have not resulted in a higher prevalence of zombies. Moreover, there are no indications that banks have eased conditions more for zombies than for other firms.

The target for issuance of domestic government bonds and T-bills in 2020 is kr. 75 and kr. 30 billion, respectively. This is unchanged from 2019. Issuance will be focused in the 2- and 10-year maturity segments. A new 30-year nominal bond maturing in 2052 will be opened in the 1st half of the year.

Danish firms increasingly have goods processed abroad and sell them directly from abroad. This allows for a higher degree of specialisation, as well as capacity expansion. However, when firms outsource production, Danish value added is to some extent decoupled from use of Danish labour. This is a challenge when measuring wage competitiveness, so in this analysis adjustment is made for Danish firms' activities abroad. That provides a more accurate impression of the competitiveness of physical production in Denmark.

Macro statistics on foreign direct investment (FDI) are blurred by offshore centers with enormous inward and outward investment positions. This paper uses several new data sources to estimate the global FDI network while disentangling real investment and phantom investment and allocating real investment to ultimate investor economies. We find that phantom investment into corporate shells with no substance and no real links to the local economy may account for almost 40 percent of global FDI.

This analysis is a first step in Danmarks Nationalbank's efforts to understand how climate change may affect macroeconomic and financial stability. Climate change may pose risks to the financial sector and financial stability. Financial institutions should understand and incorporate these risks into their risk management, and financial regulation should reflect the actual risks. A sound financial sector can contribute to the transition to a green economy by ensuring continued allocation of capital.

The largest credit institutions’ results remain high, underpinned by low loan impairment charges and income from mortgage loan refinancing. Several institutions have launched initiatives aimed at securing future earnings. The largest credit institutions have reduced excess capital adequacy, and for a few it is low. The institutions should reconsider their capital targets to ensure an appropriate distance between capitalisation and capital requirements.

Danmarks Nationalbank conducts a stress test of the Danish banking sector twice a year. The stress test shows that some systemic banks breach their risk-based capital requirements in a severe recession scenario. The analysis further shows that the systemic banks will have to issue new MREL in substantial amounts in order to satisfy their requirements under stress.

I define occupations that are employed in more industries as “broader” occupations. I study the implications of broadness for mismatch of the unemployed and vacancies across occupations and industries. I empirically find that workers in broader occupations are better insured against industry-specific shocks. I build a general equilibrium model that uses occupational broadness as a microfoundation of mismatch. The model matches the empirical findings but predicts that mismatch cannot significantly contribute to aggregate fluctuations in the unemployment rate.

Pension companies' need for liquidity will increase when the sector has to meet the requirement for central clearing of interest rate swaps and other derivatives by 2023. Pension companies should prepare so as to be able to manage cash variation margin requirements at all times. In the event of substantial interest rate increases, the companies will need large amounts of cash to be posted as variation margin the following day.

The Faroese economy has been in an upswing since 2014. Unemployment is now very low, and there is a risk that this may lead to overheating of the economy. The central government can increase the stability of the economy by pursuing countercyclical fiscal policy. The ageing of the population means that in the long term tax revenue will not be able to match government expenditure. This can be addressed by implementing reforms now.

We show that U.S. housing wealth is very illiquid despite all the instruments for extracting home equity available to homeowners. We come to this conclusion by studying the implications of liquidity constraints in a quantitative life-cycle model in which we explicitly account for key institutional details of the U.S. housing and mortgage markets. We find that mortgage market frictions that prevent homeowners from tapping into home equity are sizeable and that most homeowners keep their consumption low for precautionary reasons.

The paper studies the relationship between the riskiness of banks' assets and their average risk weight. Risk weights explain about half of the variation in projected credit losses in the 2018 European Banking Authority stress test, and show a clear relationship with estimates of banks' asset volatilities. However, risk weights do a worse job of explaining future credit losses than do asset volatilities, especially for banks using internal models.

Prices of food, clothing, restaurant meals, laundry, rent and other elements of household consumption are rising much less than many Danes think. In other words, the Danes overestimate the rate of inflation – but not as much as people in EU do on average. This appears from a Working Paper prepared by Kim Abildgren, Chief Adviser, and Andreas Kuchler, Senior Economist, from Danmarks Nationalbank.

The level of inflation perceived by Danish households persistently exceed observed inflation levels measured by official Consumer Price Indices. Accounting for even several of the factors usually put forward to explain the overestimation bias can only reduce it slightly. Food prices carry a larger weight in perceived inflation than in the official CPI, and we find clear seasonal effects in the inflation perception bias. The bias is also reflected in the households' expectations of the future inflation level, but we find a much smaller bias in the expectations regarding future changes in inflation rates.

Growth has been high for some years, a trend that is set to continue. This is mainly attributable to fisheries. Unemployment is very low, and large-scale airport investments in the coming years will increase pressures in the labour market. Despite government surpluses and modest government debt, there is a need to develop a broader business sector and strengthen government finances substantially in the coming years.

If you want to hit a moving target, you must aim ahead of the target, not at its current position. This principle applies just as well when playing dodgeball at school as when shooting down enemy missiles in wartime. It also applies when policymakers determine the banks' capital buffer level required to weather hard times. They must look at the direction in which the financial development is moving, rather than at its current state.

The paper describes how to conduct macroprudential policy in an environment where economic indicators move in a cyclical fashion, policy works with a lag, and there are adjustment costs to changing policy. It shows that policy instruments such as the countercyclical capital buffer should be set not only based on the present state of the cycle, but also on where the cycle is heading.

Danmarks Nationalbank has assessed Betalingsservice, which is owned and operated by Nets, against the standards for direct debit schemes established by the European Central Bank, ECB. Danmarks Nationalbank's overall assessment is that Nets has ensured that Betalingsservice extensively complies with the ECB requirements. At the same time, Danmarks Nationalbank has recommendations and remarks on how to strengthen Nets' management and operation of Betalingsservice. Inter alia, Danmarks Nationalbank recommends that Nets strengthen the compliance area and formalise its requirements for the critical suppliers' risk management. It is also remarked that the transparency of the fee structure will be enhanced if the firms clearly show their own fees to the consumers. Nets can be conducive to ensuring this. Danmarks Nationalbank oversees the payment and settlement systems in Denmark in order to promote safe and efficient settlement of payments, securities trades, etc. Betalingsservice is one of the solutions subject to this oversight.

We propose a new model for the term structure of interest rates, which embraces the extreme persistence observed in interest rate data. This is achieved by introducing so-called volatility-induced stationarity. We apply the model to U.S. Treasury bond yield data and show that volatility-induced stationarity improves estimation of term premia and forecasting of interest rates compared to existing models.

Stock market investors react only on the objective facts and not the spin in media articles, a new working paper from Danmarks Nationalbank shows.

We show that Stock market investors react only on the objective facts and not the spin in media articles. We use natural language processing tools to compute the tone of 288 thousands articles written by Reuters between 2000 and 2018, and show that it predicts the short-term stock market performance of companies. However, by exploiting a combination of unsupervised machine learning and econometric techniques, we show that this effect is only due to the informational content of the article, and not the framing of that article. The market sees through media spin and can filter informational content from irrelevant tone.

The Danish economy has been in a boom phase in recent years. Over time, weaker growth abroad will affect the Danish economy, and prospects are for slightly lower growth rates over the coming years. The labour market is showing the first signs of a slowdown. The boom has evolved without considerable imbalances building up, and the Danish economy is well prepared for a slowdown. Slightly lower growth during a boom period is not an indication that fiscal policy should be eased.

In September, Danmarks Nationalbank lowered the interest rate on certificates of deposit by 10 basis points to -0.75 per cent. The interest rate reduction is a consequence of the reduction by the European Central Bank of its key monetary policy rate by 10 basis points. The krone rate remains stable, being slightly on the weak side of the central rate. Overall, financial conditions are accommodative and support the ongoing economic upswing. Declining interest rates have triggered a new refinancing boom during which many households have opted for lower-rate home loans. Credit growth remains moderate and has slowed slightly in 2019.

The US has a current account deficit and president Donald Trump has an explicit goal of reducing it. However, new trade agreements and new tariffs do not remove the deficit, as the current account is basically determined by the balance between total savings and investments in the US. The growing public budget deficit, on the other hand, tends to increase the US deficit, but a large international demand for dollars helps keeping costs down.

Falling mortgage rates have made mortgage refinancing attractive in order to reduce overall home financing costs. Many homeowners raise additional mortgage debt when refinancing. The additional funds are used for increased consumption and home improvements. However, some homeowners spend the funds on reducing other debt or building up a liquidity buffer.

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, requiring a large-scale economic transition in many areas, shows a review of the rapidly growing number of scientific articles and books on this subject, presented in a working paper.

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of this century. Mitigation requires a large-scale transition to a low-carbon economy. This paper provides an overview of the rapidly growing literature on the role of macroeconomic and financial policy tools in enabling this transition.

Recession probabilities in the USA and the euro area have risen to high levels in recent years. A global downturn will affect a small open economy like Denmark. The risk of recession in Denmark has risen in line with the risk abroad, but the Danish economy is poised well-positioned to withstand a potential global economic downturn.

Over the past decade, business investment appetite has been in line with that experienced during previous crises and upswings. Investment has increased as spare production capacity has been absorbed. During the crisis and post-crisis years, investment was mainly constrained by high economic uncertainty and low foreign demand for Danish products. Since the mid-1990s, the growing weight of the service sectors in the Danish economy has structurally reduced investment.

The target for issuance of domestic government bonds in 2019 is increased to kr. 75 billion due to an increase in the central government's purchases of government-guaranteed mortgage bonds. The expected average sales of government bonds per auction are around kr. 3 billion at market value. The on-the-run issues will remain unchanged and focus will be on issuance in the 2-year and 10-year nominal bonds.

The natural real interest rate has declined since the 1990s. An important explanation is demographic trends in Denmark and abroad, which can be expected to continue in the coming years. Among other factors, lower natural interest rates have prompted central banks in several countries to apply unconventional monetary policies in order to stimulate the economy and increase inflation. Spillover effects from similar measures could affect the Danish economy in the future.

We study how the introduction of interest-only mortgages in 2003 affected job creation and the skill composition of the workforce over the business cycle. The reform significantly increased household expenditure and firms reacted to this demand shock by creating jobs. These positions, however, are classified as low-skilled occupations, filled by younger and less educated workers who face earlier separations and a higher degree of unemployment ex-post.

The analysis looks at the complex network created when the financial institutions exchange many thousands of transactions across the Danish interbank market. The analysis shows that there is a core consisting of a few institutions which are important in terms of spreading liquidity, and that a small number of institutions alone connect isolated institutions with the rest of the network. The interconnectedness of the network emphasise the importance of having robust central participants.

The report presents the conclusions from Danmarks Nationalbank's oversight of the Danish payments infrastructure in 2018. Two major system changes were introduced with the implementation of Kronos2 and the migration of kroner to the trans-European securities platform, T2S. The core payment and settlement systems and most important payment solutions extensively comply with international standards for efficiency and security. Cyber risk management was still a focus area of Danmarks Nationalbank's oversight. The maturity of the systems' cyber security efforts varies.

The systemic credit institutions' results remain high, underpinned by low loan impairment charges since 2010. A substantial dampening of economic growth would lead to higher loan impairment charges and consequently lower earnings in future. The requirements for banks' capital structure are likely to be tightened considerably in the coming years. This may put pressure on the systemic credit institutions' excess capital adequacy if they fail to build up further capital adequacy beforehand.

Danmarks Nationalbanks conducts a semi-annual stress test of the Danish banking sector. The stress test shows that the systemic banks satisfy their risk-based capital requirements and the leverage ratio requirement in a severe recession scenario. The analysis also looks at the banks' ability to satisfy MREL under stress and shows that the systemic banks depend on being able to continue to issue MREL-eligible instruments in order to satisfy the requirement.

Economic growth continues in Denmark and many other parts of the world, but the pace is set to slowdown in the coming years. A substantial dampening of economic growth would lead to higher loan impairment charges and consequently lower earnings in the banks in the future, Danmarks Nationalbank points out in its semi-annual analysis of financial stability in Denmark.

In this paper an agent-based model is used to investigate how tightening loan-to-value and loan-to-income ratios affects house price cycles. The use of an agent-based model allows for the analysis of the effects of these policies on heterogeneous households. I find that these policies reduce house price cycles in a non-linear way that depends crucially on the distribution of households and highlights the importance of macroprudential policymakers taking into account the distributions of households.

I build a DSGE model where households face a loan-to-value (LTV) constraint and a debt-service-to-income (DTI) constraint. From an estimation of the model, I infer when each constraint was binding over the 1975-2017 timespan in the U.S. I also infer that DTI standards were relaxed during the mid-2000s credit boom. In the light of this, the boom could have been avoided by tighter DTI limits, but not by tighter LTV limits. The role of multiple credit constraints for the emergence of nonlinear dynamics is corroborated by county panel data.

Kronos is Danmarks Nationalbank's payment system for large-value time-critical payments and it is the heart of the Danish financial infrastructure. The analysis assesses the robustness of the system, measured as the change in participants' liquidity needs as well as their ability to settle payments in a timely manner when the system is exposed to stress in three different scenarios: (1) One large participant cannot submit payments for a full business day, (2) the money market is inaccessible, and (3) the participants' access to intraday credit is reduced. The analysis shows that the system is resilient in all three scenarios.

This analysis shows how fluctuations in equity prices affect business in-vestments in fixed capital via a "Tobin's Q channel". The main conclusion is that an increase of 10 per cent in the prices of Danish listed firms leads to an increase of 1.8 per cent in those firms' investments.