The recent financial crisis teaches important lessons regarding the lender-of-last resort (LLR) function. Large swap lines extended in 2007-08 from the Federal Reserve to other central banks show that the classic concept of a national LLR fails to address key vulnerabilities in a globalized...

In the face of huge balance of payments surpluses and internal inflationary pressures, China has been in a classic conflict between internal and external balance under its U.S. dollar currency peg. Over the longer term, Chinafs large, modernizing, and diverse economy will need exchange rate...

Among the developing countries of the world, those emerging markets that have sought some degree of integration into the global financial system are characterized by higher per capita incomes, higher long-run growth rates, and lower output and consumption volatility. These characteristics are...

The U.S. deficit in the current account, now running at an annual rate of over US$700 billion, has reached levels (as a percentage of GDP) not seen since the first decades of the 19th century. The deficit is soaking up roughly three-quarters of the world's available external surpluses. If the...

This paper presents a quantitative evaluation of the effect on the yen of some alternative scenarios under which Japan reaches current account balance. The analytical framework is a global general equilibrium model, based closely on Obstfeld and Rogoff (2005a, b), within which relative prices...

The new open-economy macroeconomics has allowed economists to tackle classical problems with new tools, while also generating new ideas and questions. In their attempts to make the new models capture empirical regularities, researchers have entertained a variety of assumptions about the...

These remarks were presented at the 2008 International Conference, gFrontiers in Monetary Theory and Policy,h held by the Institute for Monetary and Economic Studies, Bank of Japan, in Tokyo on May 28-29, 2008.