In this Policy Contribution, Jean Pisani-Ferry, takes a look at the way the IMF his gradually making its come-back from an era of crisis confidence and legitimacy. The author believes the Fund could gain a significant role as the key institution that links macroeconomic and financial...

In this paper, original written for the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee (ECON) of the European Parliament on 30 November as part of the series entitled 'The threat of "currency wars": global imbalances and their effects on currencies', Bruegel Fellows Jean Pisani-Ferry and Zsolt Darvas...

Reform of the international monetary system is under discussion after three decades of apathy. Tectonic shifts in the balance of international power have made reform more urgent. However, in the short term, there is little chance of a grand redesign of the international monetary system....

In this Policy Contribution, Jean Pisani-Ferry observes the lack of European interest towards China's exchange policy rate. He believes that Europeans, compared to Americans, are slower to react to external developments. The absence of significant external deficit, doubts about which policy...

The evolution of the IMS and IFS in the past several hundred years can be viewed through the lens of the Copernican heliocentric system developed over 500 years ago. We trace out the evolution across regimes of the IMS and IFS in terms of network representations of the Copernican system. We...

In 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote his famous tract The Economic Consequences of the Peace. In that work, he anticipated the collapse of the first era of globalization that began in the mid-nineteenth century. He admonished the short-sighted assumption that these years of relative peace and...

Written on the 50th anniversary of floating exchange rates, this paper deals with possible alternatives to a unipolar dollar-based system. It considers (1) measures of international currency use; (2) potential challengers to the dollar; (3) network externalities; and (4) the plausibility of gold...

We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations. When asset markets are illiquid, as modeled via endogenous...

The gold standard emerged as the international monetary system by the end of the 19th century. We formally study its properties in a micro-founded model and find that the scarcity of the world gold stock not only results in a suboptimal output of goods that are purchased with money but also...