Under the world dollar standard, a discrete appreciation by a dollar creditor country of the United States, such as China or Japan, has no predictable effect on its trade surplus. Currency appreciation by the creditor country will slow its economic growth and eventually cause deflation but...

We study the pass-through of exchange rate changes to consumer prices for the euro area by estimating vector error correction models for Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Using the weights of the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) we compute a weighted average of the...

For creditor countries on the periphery of the dollar standard such as China with current account surpluses, foreign mercantile pressure to appreciate their currencies and become more flexible is misplaced. Just the expectation of variable exchange appreciation seriously disrupts the natural...