In dealing with global and domestic economic and financial cycle spillovers in the last years of turbulent global environment, central banks have broadened their objectives by including the financial stability goal, as well as many creative innovations in their toolkit. In a low or zero interest rate environment, the monetary authorities across the world turn to the use of unconventional monetary policy measures and obviously now, several years after the outburst of the crisis, it is still an ongoing practice for most central banks. While still examining their usefulness, it is difficult to discuss their exit dynamics, even in the case of the FED, although its monetary policy normalization started at the end of the last year. Anyway, it is still debated whether the unconventional instruments and tools created during the crisis will become an integral part of the conventional monetary policy framework. Probably this will depend on country specific circumstances and individual contribution of these newly created instruments and measures in fulfilling policy objectives on price and financial stability. Macroprudential tools have also been widely used for dealing with specific features of the financial cycles in the last period, aiming to boost financial soundness or provide positive feedback to the economic recovery that has certainly expanded the horizon of their expected impacts compared to the past. Policy measures aimed to support lending, especially in the economies with strong negative loop between private sector leverage and banks’ credit risk, will probably stay effective for a reasonable time span.

The capacity of economies to cope with these headwinds related to the financial cycle recovery will rely upon providing resilient policy framework and keeping sufficient policy buffers in all segments of the economy. Obviously, many aspects on the economic and financial cycles have already been observed, with even more still awaiting to be explored. Our latest experience is mainly related to the bust of the cycles, however we need to know if the size of spillovers or effectiveness of our instruments will be the same in the boom stage of the cycle. The seminal work by Borio from 2012, has already provided some stylized facts regarding frequency, duration and leading indicators of the cycles, incorporating the period of the last global crisis. However, we need  BIS central bankers’ speeches  1  to disentangle country’s specific features of the cycles as a basis for the policy mix design. In analyzing financial cycle, it is necessary to go deeper into bank’s balance sheet, and therewith to head towards data granularity as an important platform to better assess banks’ risk attitude as well as to appropriately link banks’ specifics and their market behavior. Consequently, increasing knowledge of economic and financial cycles requires stronger modeling abilities, enlargement of the analytical base and combining information of both domestic and cross border spillover channels, as a floor for adequate policy responses. Touching upon the issue of economic and financial cycle spillovers in the case of Macedonian economy, I could refer to the following points.