Given the shortcomings of the current responses to the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone, the author proposes utilising national gold reserves as collateral for government debt. Gold backing would be quite attractive to bond investors and would significantly ease the burden of high sovereign...

The IMF's Interim Committee recently for the first time discussed the creation of a “Substitution Account” to convert certain amounts of excess reserve currencies into SDRs. This issue is likely to be on the agenda of the next annual meeting of the IMF in the fall of this year. Prof....

As the recent struggles connected with the readjustment of exchange rates within the European Monetary System have shown, the relatively unproblematic "running in" period of the EMS, which was supposed to be a constructive contribution to the creation of a more viable international monetary...

The record of the European Monetary System at the five-year mark is rather a disappointment for the System’s advocates. Has the “EMS experiment” failed? Or is there potential for developing the System further to the advantage of all member countries?

Critics of the EMS claim that it has failed to realise the hopes aroused at the time of its inception; a convergence of economic policies, they maintain, has not been induced by fixed exchange rates. What is the true position with regard to the convergence of economic policies?

The none too firmly established position of the IMF with regard to the realization of the objectives of its Articles of Agreement has been additionally impaired by the establishment of the European Monetary System. From an international point of view a revision of the present EMS concept would...

Last weeks' dollar crisis which ended with the devaluation of the dollar emphasised once more the need for a reform of the international monetary system. It also brought to the open the necessity to reorganise the EEC monetary relations. The floating of pound and lira seems to support this case.

Although regional development banking is a recent institution in the field of international cooperation, the author asks the question whether in the light of current and possible events in the 1970s its fundamental policies are appropriate to those developments in particular, and to economic...