This introductory chapter presents the main notions that will be used in this
book and brings together those most tightly linked:
– Financial stability (1.1),
– Financial fragility, liquidity, and leverage (1.2),
– Safe assets (1.3),
– Bubbles and contagion (1.4),
– Moral hazard and “too big to fail” (TBTF) (1.5),
– Systemic risk (1.6).
1.1 Financial stability
In monetary economics, there is a widely accepted denition of price stability: the
prices which should be stabilized (those of goods and services) are known; their
changes are measured in a precise and transparent manner (using consumer price in-
dices); those changes can be associated with eects on social welfare within a bench-
mark theoretical framework (the New Keyne