In our current time the idea of a global currency seems to be pathbreaking. However, the introduction of such a currency requires a uniform governance which implicates that countries lose national autonomy. Presently, countries prefer national monetary policy and national financial regulation....

Predicting the timing of currency and banking crises is likely to remain an elusive task for academics, financial market participants, and policymakers. Few foresaw the Asian crises and fewer still could have imagined their severity. However, recent events have highlighted the importance of...

These are the narrative individual country histories of exchange rate arrangements, 1946-2001 that underpin "The Modern History of Exchange Rate Arrangements: A Reinterpretation". The chronologies allow us to date dual or multiple exchange rate episodes, as well as to differentiate between...

We investigate how the relation between gold prices and the U.S. Dollar has been affected by the recent turmoil in financial markets. We use spot prices of gold and spot bilateral exchange rates against the Euro and the British Pound to study the pattern of volatility spillovers. We estimate the...

This is the 2007 Edition of the only book in print in the world about the Single Global Currency, and is the only book in the world priced in 143 currencies (down from 147 in the 2006 edition.).This number is significant, as it's the number of currencies required among the 192 U.N. members to...

Why are investors rushing to purchase US government securities when the US is the epicentre of the financial crisis? This column attributes the paradox to key emerging market economies’ exchange practices, which require reserves most often invested in US government securities. America’s...

Protracted expansionary monetary policies in advanced countries have renewed the debate over policy options to cope with large capital inflows that drive credit expansions in emerging economies. In a forthcoming paper, we show that during capital inflow bonanzas credit grows more rapidly and its...

In contrast to Robert Mundell‘s Optimum Currency Area theory and his recommendation of forming a monetary union, the economic fundamentals of Euro area member countries have not harmonized. The opposite holds: the Euro core countries - most of all Germany, but also the Netherlands and Finland...

This study presents an alternative reconsideration of traditional Optimum Currency Areas (OCA) macroeconomic convergence criteria as options for West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) commencement, in the light of recent advancements in monetary theory. It presents micro-founded models, rooted in New...

Using a three countries model with flexible exchange rates, this study tries to analyze the situation in an asymmetric monetary area around a big country. The model consider a stochastic framework where the monetary policy is used to stabilize the inflation and the current account. The monetary...