Pre conference at Banque de France 11 to 12 March 2024 and session at the WEHC in Lund, 28 July to 1 August 2025

International central bank cooperation is a politically sensitive issue, which is why official accounts of international central bank cooperation outside more formal bodies such as the BIS and the IMF are rare. However, one of the most important measures to counter the devastating effects of the 2008 crisis was intensive international central bank cooperation. Major central banks acted as liquidity guarantors by providing drawing rights and various types of credit swap arrangements. This was seen by many contemporary observers as a ‘new’ type of central bank cooperation, not only in scope but also in kind. But central banks have always operated at the intersection of the national and the international. The provision of services such as clearing, and hence short-term credit through drawing rights and rediscounting, was in many cases part of the daily routine of central banks. Even in strict exchange rate regimes such as the classical gold standard, various types of foreign assets, also held abroad, were important instruments for central banks to act as shock absorbers for the national economy (Bazot, Monnet & Morys 2022). In the Scandinavian Monetary Union (SMU), these daily clearing arrangements between central banks served to maintain liquidity and smoothen the effects of international capital flows (Ögren & Trautwein 2022).

In this pre-conference and session we look at international central bank cooperation, both formal and more informal through clearing and other operations, both in day-to-day operations and in times of crisis.

The pre-conference will be organised as a hybrid conference, i.e. both on-site and online.

If you are interested in participating in the pre-conference and/or the WEHC session, please send an email to Anders Ögren (anders.ogren@ekhist.uu.se) with your name, affiliation, a tentative title of your paper/presentation and an abstract of minimum 800 words no later than 23 December 2024.

Organisers: Vincent Bignon Banque de France, Anders Ögren Uppsala University & Hans-Michael Trautwein Oldenburg University