Foreign exchange turnover in Asian currencies grew faster than the global total between 2001 and 2004. Renminbi trading rose particularly strongly. Evolving expectations about the renminbi seem to be joining the dollar/yen spot rate in exerting an influence on Asian foreign exchange markets....

This overview paper examines two main issues. The first is why the exchange rate matters, especially for emerging market economies. The second is under what circumstances and how countries have dealt with the challenges posed by the exchange rate in recent years in the context of inflation...

n-deliverable forwards (NDFs) allow investors and borrowers to take positions in currencies that are subject to official controls. Turnover in NDFs has risen in recent years as non-residents use them to hedge increasing investment in local currency bonds. Pricing in deliverable forward and NDF...

Measures of de facto capital account openness for China and India raise the question whether the Chinn-Ito measure of de jure capital account openness is useful and whether the Lane-Milesi-Ferretti measure of de facto openness ranks the two countries correctly. We examine eight dimensions of de...

We analyse global and euro area imbalances by focusing on China and Germany as large surplus and creditor countries. In the 2000s, domestic reforms in both countries expanded the effective labour force, restrained wages, shifted income towards profits and increased corporate saving. As a result,...

This paper analyses the discussion of a substitution account in the 1970s and how the account might have performed had it been agreed in 1980. The substitution account would have allowed central banks to diversify away from the dollar into the IMF’s Special Drawing Right (SDR), comprised of US...

We analyse the turnover of fixed income derivatives in seven currencies to test the hypothesis that market participants increasingly use contracts based on private rather than government rates to hedge and to take positions. In the US dollar money market, private benchmarks long ago displaced...

This paper shows that the Japanese and Swiss foreign exchange interventions in 2003/04 and 2009/10 seem to have lowered long-term interest rates in a range of industrial countries, including Japan and Switzerland. It seems that this decline was triggered by the investment of the intervention...