More than 20 countries have increased their aggregate foreign exchange reserves and other official foreign assets by an annual average of nearly $1 trillion in recent years. This buildup—mainly through intervention in the foreign exchange markets—keeps the currencies of the interveners...

The economic and financial problems in the euro area are clearly serious and plentiful. An increasing number of commentators and economists have begun to question whether the euro can survive. There are only two alternatives. Europe can jettison the monetary union or it can adopt a complementary...

The euro crisis is fundamentally a political crisis. At its core the crisis is about national sovereignty and the process in which European governments can agree to transfer it to new, required euro area institutions governing banking sectors and fiscal policies. This transfer of national...

The global trading system underwent two major developments as the 20th century drew to a close. The first was the agreement between the United States and China in mid-November that will enable the Chinese to join the World Trade Organization in the near future. The second was the WTO's failure...

The eighth annual APEC leaders' meeting in Brunei in November 2000 may have marked a turning point in the life of the organization. It clearly set the stage for major progress at the October 2001 summit in Shanghai during the year of Chinese chairmanship of the APEC.

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which set out to achieve "free and open trade and investment in the region" and led highly significant liberalization initiatives in the 1990s, has been stagnating for the past decade. The main cause of APEC's marginalization was clearly the...

The "Asian economic crisis" is much deeper, much more pervasive and likely to last much longer than anyone imagined. Economies that had grown 6-8 percent annually for two decades are declining by like or greater amounts, a swing of depression-era magnitude with incalculable political and social...

China was the world's largest economy throughout most of recorded history and as recently as the late nineteenth century. The World Bank estimates that, on the basis of national purchasing power, China has already passed Germany to become the third-largest economy on the globe. It could move...

Japan proposed an "Asian Monetary Fund" during the early stages of the crisis more than a year ago. The idea was never specified sufficiently to permit objective evaluation. It was nevertheless immediately rejected, mainly by other Asians (most vocally China) but also by the United States and...

An essential pillar of a US strategy toward East Asian integration is acceptance of the legitimacy and desirability of that process. US acceptance of the economic integration of Europe is the model. Further, the United States--as well as Canada and Mexico--should seek to nest any new...