We present an incomplete markets model to understand the costs and benefits of increasing government debt in a low interest rate environment. Higher risk increases the demand for safe assets, lowering the natural rate of interest below zero, constraining monetary policy at the zero lower bound,...

Before the crisis of 1997-98, the East Asian economies except for Japan but including China pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar. To avoid further turmoil, the IMF now argues that these currencies should float more freely. However, our econometric estimations show that the dollar's...

We investigate the drivers of daily changes in the exchange value of the Chinese currency (CNY) since early 2016, when a new regime was introduced for setting the fix - the midpoint of the CNY's daily trading range against the U.S. dollar. Daily changes in the fix, which is announced just prior...

The share of U.S. dollar assets in the official foreign exchange reserve portfolios of central banks is sometimes taken as an indicator of dollar status. We show that the observed decline in the aggregate share of U.S. dollar assets does not stem from a systematic shift in currency preferences...

There is often speculation that the international roles of currencies may be changing. This paper presents the current status of these roles. The U.S. dollar continues to be the dominant currency across various uses. Yet, such a role may change over time. If this occurs, there could be...

We have documented a regime change in the U.S. Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We first derived bounds on Treasury yields that account for dealer balance sheet costs, which we call the net short and net long curves. We show that actual Treasury yields moved from the net short...

The paper assesses the international status of the Chinese currency renminbi (RMB) by recounting and reviewing the recent polices China instituted to promote the use of the RMB in the global market. The evidence suggests that the RMB is gaining acceptance overseas. However, compared with the...

Building on the facility design and application experience from the period of the global financial crisis, in March 2020 the Federal Reserve eased the terms on its standing swap lines in collaboration with other central banks, reactivated temporary swap agreements, and then introduced the new...

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, China has rolled out a number of initiatives to actively promote the international role of the renminbi and to denominate more of its international claims away from the US dollar and into the renminbi. This paper discusses the factors shaping the prospects...

We study the recent Australian experience with yield curve control (YCC) of government bonds as perhaps the best evidence of how this policy might work in other developed economies. We interpret the evidence with a simple model in which YCC affects prices of both government and other bonds via...