This fascinating book presents a lively discussion of key issues resulting from the recent financial crisis. The expert contributors explore why the global financial crisis occurred, how it destroyed wealth, triggered mass unemployment and created an unprecedented loss of control on employment,...

China has been provoked into speeding renmnibi internationalization. But despite rapid growth in offshore financial markets in RMB, the Chinese authorities are essentially trapped into maintaining exchange controls—reinforced by financial repression in domestic interest rates—to avoid an...

China keeps its exchange rate tightly fixed to the dollar. Its productivity growth and trade surplus have been high, and it continues to accumulate large dollar reserves. Many observers take this as evidence that the renminbi is undervalued and should be appreciated to reduce the Chinese trade...

Since 2004, China has been backed into a situation where the renminbi is expected to go ever higher against the dollar, and this one-way bet has led to a loss of domestic monetary control. Combined with a more general flight from the U.S. dollar, the resulting monetary explosion in China...

We argue that criticism concerning the Chinese dollar peg is misplaced as no predictable link exists between the exchange rate and the trade balance of an international creditor economy. The stable nominal yuan/dollar rate is argued to have stabilized Chinese, East Asian and global growth....

Government deficits are accelerating deindustrialization in the United States. Should we care? Absolutely. One reason is that manufacturing and associated learning-by-doing are powerful sources of external benefits that accelerate economy-wide productivity growth. A second is that the loss of...

Japan's macroeconomic problem has yet to be properly diagnosed. Throughout the 1990s, policy makers could not decide on the proper macro economic measures to combat the country's severe economic slump. We propose a unified explanation, with deep historical roots, of why aggregate private demand...