The most recent BIS triennial survey shows that turnover in foreign exchange markets increased by more than 70% over the three years to April 2007. Two specific findings stand out. First, the growth in transactions between banks and other financial institutions was particularly strong,...

Interest rate differentials have been a driving force behind exchange rate movements in recent years. This has focused market attention on the role of currency carry trade positions, and on the possibility that a sudden unwinding might adversely affect financial stability. However, carry trades...

The 2004 survey shows a surge in traditional foreign exchange trading. This seems to have been driven by momentum trading and carry trades in a global search for yield on the part of institutional investors and leveraged players as well as by hedging activity.

The financial crisis has heightened the awareness of the risk of a sudden shortage of foreign currencies. Governments and central banks are looking for ways to obtain "liquidity assurance", ie the assurance of having access to international liquidity if they need it. This article discusses how...

This article examines whether short-run inflation expectations and indicators of long-term credibility have been affected by the great recession and by the policies to counter it. Measures of short-run expectations dropped in the crisis, particularly in advanced economies, but have since...

Economic derivatives allow traders to take direct positions on the outcomes of macroeconomic data releases. In contrast to survey-based measures, the prices of economic derivatives provide information on the entire probability distribution underlying these expectations, not just point estimates....

Commodity prices rose strongly in recent years until mid-2008, driving inflation up worldwide. This feature investigates aspects of the impact of the rise in food and energy prices on headline inflation and its dynamics using a dataset for CPI inflation and its food and energy components that...