"As the world economy slowly recovers from the very deep and widespread recession of recent years, many countries confront very serious fiscal imbalances. How much time they have to deal with these imbalances is a central question, the salience of which can only have been increased by the...

One area where international monetary cooperation has failed is in the role of surplus or creditor countries in limiting or in correcting external imbalances. The stock dimensions of such imbalances - net external positions, leverage in national balance sheets, currency/maturity mismatches, the...