This paper focuses on some of the macroeconomic risks that lie ahead for Latin America. The discussion is informed by my work on crises and capital flows and their macroeconomic consequences. The trends and initial conditions that allowed the region to weather the global economic storm of...

Financial crises are historically associated with the “4 deadly D’s”: Sharp economic downturns follow banking crises; with government revenues dragged down, fiscal deficits worsen; deficits lead to debt; as debt piles up rating downgrades follow. For the most fortunate countries, the...

The global scope and depth of the 2007-2009 crisis is unprecedented in the post World War II period. As such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression, or the Great Contraction as dubbed by Friedman and Schwartz (1963). We highlight some of the similarities between these...

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...

Capital inflows can be a mixed blessing, especially in economies with thin domestic financial markets and when driven by investors with a short-term focus. Many levers of policy can be applied to resist the effects of the inflows. One that has been widely relied upon has been currency...

In this note we summarize our recent paper, where we delved into the details of this apple-to-oranges problem with the aim of defining a minimum common ground. We begin our analysis by explicitly documenting the kinds of measures that are construed as capital controls. Along the way, we describe...

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...

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...

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...