Currency market intervention-cum-reserve accumulation has emerged as the favored "self-insurance" strategy in recipient countries of excessive private capital inflows. This paper argues that capital account management represents a less costly alternative line of defense deserving renewed...

This paper investigates the spread of what started as a crisis at the core of the global financial system to emerging economies. While emerging economies had exhibited some resilience through the early stages of the financial turmoil that began in the summer of 2007, they have been hit hard...

This paper investigates the United States dollar's role as the international currency of choice as a key contributing factor in critical global developments that led to the crisis of 2007-09, and considers the future role of the dollar as the global economy emerges from that crisis. It is argued...

Germany's fiscal crisis cannot be attributed to unification per se; it arose as a consequence of ill-guided macroeconomic policies pursued in response to that event. Many structural problems that popped up along the way were mere symptoms of persistent macroeconomic mismanagement and protracted...

Challenging the conventional wisdom that structural problems are to blame for the euro area's protracted domestic demand stagnation, this paper sets out to shed some fresh light on the role of the ECB in the ongoing EMU crisis. Contrary to the widely held interpretation of the ECB as an...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of persistent macroeconomic divergence that has occurred across the eurozone in recent years. Optimal currency area theory would point toward asymmetric shocks and structural factors as the foremost candidate causes. The alternative hypothesis pursued here...

This paper sets out to investigate the forces behind the so-called "global capital flows paradox" and related "dollar glut" observed in the era of advancing financial globalization. The supposed paradox is that the developing world has increasingly come to pursue policies that resulted in...

This paper provides an overview of central banking arrangements in those European countries that have adopted the euro. Issues addressed include the structure of the "Eurosystem" and its central banking functions, the kind of independence granted to the system and the role of monetary policy...

This paper revisits Keynes's liquidity preference theory as it evolved from the Treatise on Money to The General Theory and after, with a view of assessing the theory's ongoing relevance and applicability to issues of both monetary theory and policy. Contrary to the neoclassical "special case"...

Approaching the issue of mounting global imbalances from the perspective of the "Bretton Woods II hypothesis," this paper argues that the popular preoccupation with China's supposed export-led development strategy is misplaced. It also suggests, similar to Japan's depression, subdued growth in...