This paper reexamines the issue of international financial capital mobility, which is today's economic orthodoxy. Discussion is often framed in terms of the impossible trinity. That framing distorts discussion by representing capital mobility as having equal significance with sovereign monetary...

The large international bailouts of the 1990s have been criticized for differentreasons, in particular for generating moral hazard at the expense of theglobal taxpayer. We argue in this paper that some of these concerns areexaggerated or misleading because international bailouts have no or...

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis there was much debate about global trade imbalances. Prima facie, the imbalances seem a significant problem. However, acknowledging that would question mainstream economics' celebratory stance toward globalization. That tension prompted an array of explanations...

The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning the pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. Exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. Exchange rate stability with structural reforms could be beneficial for...

This paper is concerned with international reserves. It makes two main points. Firstly, excess reserves cannot be regarded as a substitute for sound fundamentals because the former may destabilize the economic system in the longer term. Secondly, reserve accumulation financed by public debt can...

Recent research has found that current account balances under flexible regimes seem to be no less persistent than under fixed regimes. This result appears to undermine Milton Friedman's well known — and commonly accepted — claim that flexible exchange rates facilitate the adjustment of...

The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning the pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. Exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. Exchange rate stability with structural reforms could be beneficial for...

Currency and financial turmoils in international capital markets have been the focus of an extensive theoretical research which started around 30 years ago. This paper provides a synthetic overview of this theoretical modeling. We analyze the basic analytical framework corresponding to the...

When does the combination of flexible exchange rates and domestic inflation-oriented monetary policy guarantee insulation from global financial conditions? We examine a dynamic global game model of international portfolio flows where, for some combination of parameters, the unique equilibrium...

Financial assistance provided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is supposed to unlock other financing, acting as a catalyst for private capital flows. The empirical evidence of the presence of such a catalytic effect has, however, been mixed. This paper shows that a possible explanation...