In this note, we attempt to place the question of how we got to the global financial crisis that began as the US Subprime debacle in the summer of 2007 in the context of an international and historical comparative setting. It is of some poignancy that the “we” here refers to the wealthiest...

We focus on four previous systemic financial crises that the United States has experienced since 1870. These include the crisis of 1873 (called the Great Depression until the 1930s), the 1893 crisis, the panic of 1907, and the Great Depression. Given that all of the earlier crises predate the...

This is the chartbook of individual country exchange rate histories and their experience with parallel markets, 1946-2001 that accompanies "The Modern History of Exchange Rate Arrangements: A Reinterpretation." We develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes. One key...

The "traditional structural approach" to determining real commodity prices has relied exclusively on demand factors as the fundamentals that explain commodity prices. This framework, however, has been unable to explain the sustained weakness in commodity prices in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper...

This paper represents a neoclassical model that explains the observed empirical relationship between government spending and world commodity supplies and the real exchange rate and real commodity prices. It is shown that fiscal expansion and increasing world commodity supplies simultaneously...

There are cases where the parallel (or secondary) exchange rate applies only to a few limited transactions. An example is the “switch pound” in the United Kingdom during September 1950 through April 1967. However, it is not unusual for dual or parallel markets (legal or otherwise) to account...

The U.S recession of 2007 to 2009 is unique in the post-World-War-II experience by the broad company it kept. Activity contracted around the world, with the advanced countries of the North experiencing declines in spending normally the purview of the developing economies of the South. The last...

The financial press has often characterized the 2007-2008 United States subprime mess as a new breed of crisis. Indeed, this view often points to the international repercussions of the U.S.-based crisis as evidence that the globalization of financial portfolios has introduced new channels for...

This study documents a quantitative analysis of exchange rate volatilities and misalignment in Uzbekistan for the period of 1994q3–2005q2. The results suggest thatthe real exchange rate volatility and misalignment have depressing effects on the volume of trade, mainly exports in Uzbekistan....