Over the past 15 years, long-term interest rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1970s. This paper explores possible shifts in global savings and investment that have led to this fall in the world real interest rate. There are several key findings. First, the authors identify the...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. Our main insight is that, as in...

In the first era of financial globalization (1880-1914), global capital market integration led to substantial net capital movements from rich to poor economies. The historical experience stands in contrast to the contemporary globalization where gross capital mobility is equally high, but did...

Modern finance has become a very complicated field, which raises many questions about its economic and social mission. Many bankers' ignorance of complex knowledge and care for the future are hostile ingredients that transform the markets' volatility, through spillover effects, into economic and...

We study domestic and international drivers of long-term interest rates using newly compiled financial market data for Switzerland starting in 1852. We use a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model to estimate long-term trends in nominal interest rates, exchange rate growth, and...

The authors review the challenges that the Romanian economy and society had to face in the European and global geoeconomic context. Starting from the perspectives advanced by the international economic fora, the risks the European economy will have to answer through counteracting and general...

Many sovereign defaults have occurred worldwide over the past 200 years. An analysis of 321 sovereign debt restructurings since 1815 shows that foreign private and institutional investor losses were 43 percent on average. Notably, beginning in the 1970s, several debt exchanges have increasingly...

In den vergangenen 200 Jahren hat es weltweit viele Zahlungsausfälle von Staaten gegeben. Die Untersuchung von 321 Umschuldungsabkommen seit 1815 zeigt, dass Verluste von ausländischen privaten und institutionellen Investoren durchschnittlich 43 Prozent betrugen. Auffällig ist, dass es...

Once you allow for persistence in macroeconomic variables, two aspects of exchange rate credibility emerge whose relative importance can vary over time. Hence, the effect of policy measures on interest rate differentials becomes ambiguous. In this paper, a Markov-switching VAR that allows for...

In diesem Beitrag wird erstens die These aufgestellt, dass die konjunkturelle Erholung in der Eurozone allein auf die Ankündigung des OMT-Programms (Outright Monetary Transactions) durch die EZB zurückzuführen ist. Zweitens wird dargelegt, dass die Sparpolitik eine nicht tragbare Verschuldung...