Central Banks’ Unconventional Policies within the Context of the Most Critical Global Financial Crisis of the 21st Century

The accelerated deterioration of the worldwide economic climate which occurred as a consequence of the deepening financial crisis following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in the autumn of 2008 created a new context in which most central banks were forced to come up with unprecedented solutions. They drastically reduced the monetary policy interest rates up to a historical minimum level and adopted a number of monetary policy measures widely acknowledged as unconventional. Under these circumstances, our study aims to carry out a qualitative analysis of the most important „unorthodox” monetary policy measures (adopted by eight representative central banks) as well as to emphasize the differences among the various concepts used to illustrate these measures in the economic literature as well as in practice.