"When the BIS was established in 1930 it had two purposes. The most obvious practical concern was to handle a narrowly technical issue: to create a painless or crisis-minimising method for making the transfer of German postwar reparations payments. But the new institution also had a more...

The traditional approach to international finance is to view capital flows as the financial counterpart to savings and investment decisions, assuming further that the GDP boundary defines both the decision-making unit and the currency area. This "triple coincidence" of GDP area, decision-making...

In analyzing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...