Very low interest rates in major currencies have raised concerns over international credit flows to robustly growing economies in Asia. This paper examines three components of international credit and highlights several of the policy challenges that arise in constraining such credit. Our...

This paper analyses the discussion of a substitution account in the 1970s and how the account might have performed had it been agreed in 1980. The substitution account would have allowed central banks to diversify away from the dollar into the IMF’s Special Drawing Right (SDR), comprised of US...

Large-scale forex intervention in emerging market economies (EMEs) aimed at resisting currency appreciation has major implications for the composition of banking system balance sheets. The domestic monetary consequences depend on the nature of central bank liabilities that are the counterpart of...

We examine how financial expansion and contraction cycles affect the broader economy through their impact on real economic sectors in a panel of countries over 1960-2005. Periods of accelerated growth of the financial sector are more likely to be followed by abrupt financial contractions than...

Well developed financial markets are a necessary condition for a currency to play a role as a reserve currency. The introduction of the euro greatly improved the functioning of euro financial markets. This paper investigates whether euro financial markets have developed sufficiently to...

This paper provides new evidence on the rise of the dollar as an international currency, focusing on its role in the conduct of trade and the provision of trade credit. We show that the shift to the dollar occurred much earlier than conventionally supposed: during and immediately after World War...