Global financial integration has been associated with divergent patterns of real convergence and the current account in emerging markets. While countries in emerging Asia have been running sizeable current account surpluses, countries in emerging Europe have been facing large current account...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MSVAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

The Federal Reserve's quantitative easing is presented as injecting $600 billion into "the economy." But instead of getting banks lending to Americans again - households and firms - the money is going abroad, through arbitrage interest-rate speculation, currency speculation, and capital flight....