Pegging the renminbi (RMB) to the US dollar since 1994 has characterised China’s exchange rate policy, under either a fixed peg or appreciating crawling peg. The current policy, announced in June 2010, of ‘floating with reference to a basket’ has now in April 2015 made the RMB 19 per cent...

On 19 June 2010 the Chinese authorities announced that the renminbi (RMB) was henceforth to be pegged to a currency basket. Yet, it has quite closely followed the USD, though having appreciated by 2.7 % by the time of writing. At the G20 Seoul Summit on 11-12 November 2010, China committed to...

What is an optimal or a sustainable external debt - for a country, region or sector? How should one monitor and evaluate debt to preclude a crisis? We use stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt. The deviation of the actual from the optimal will serve as a...

We use stochastic optimal control-dynamic programming (DP) to derive the optimal foreign debt/net worth, consumption/net worth, current account/net worth, and endogenous growth rate in an open economy. Unlike the literature that uses an Intertemporal Budget Constraint (IBC) or the Maximum...

In 1998 Rüdiger Dornbusch gave the Munich Lectures in Economics entitled “International Financial Crises”. The CES Academic Council awarded him the prize and title “Distinguished CES Fellow” for his outstanding work on the monetary theory of foreign trade.Rüdiger Dornbusch passed away...

What is the role of “large players” like hedge funds and other highly leveraged institutions in speculative attacks? In recent theoretical work, large players may induce an attack by an early move, providing information to smaller agents. In contrast, many observers argue that large players...

The recent financial crises, especially the debt crisis in Asia, have led to questions su ch as: what are their causes, what is an excessive debt and how vulnerable is an economy to external shocks? We develop an economic model of international finance and debt based upon two sources of...