Central Bank Learning from the Global Financial Crisis

This paper explores what lessons central bankers have drawn from the 2008 global financial crisis, how their understanding of those lessons has changed from 2008 through 2015, and how their current lesson-drawing efforts compare to those after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We do so through an analysis of over 1,800 speeches by high-ranking central bankers around the world from 1997 through 2015 that explicitly discuss lessons learned from these crises. Our paper uses both qualitative analysis of a representative subset of speeches and innovative automated textual analysis techniques (including Natural Language Processing) on the full set in order to document and investigate relevant patterns in central bankers’ speech, allowing us to see how crisis experiences have affected central bank discourse both across time and cross nationally.