The desirability of fiscal constraints in monetary unions depends critically on whether the monetary authority can commit to follow its policies. If it can commit, then debt constraints can only impose costs. If it cannot commit, then fiscal policy has a free-rider problem, and debt constraints...

The world's major money printers are in trouble. The debt-based monetary architecture is going through serious stress. The recent banking and sovereign debt crises are systemic symptoms indicating an upcoming and unavoidable change in money creation methodology. This paper addresses the key...

This paper studies a New Keynesian model of a two-country world with a zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint for nominal interest rates. A floating exchange rate regime is assumed. The presence of the ZLB generates multiple equilibria. The two countries can experience recurrent liquidity traps...

We characterize how U.S. global systemically important banks (GSIBs) supply short-term dollar liquidity in repo and foreign exchange swap markets in the post-Global Financial Crisis regulatory environment and serve as the "lenders-of-second-to-last-resort". Using daily supervisory bank balance...

We develop a model of gross capital flows and analyze their role in global financial stability. In our model, consistent with the data, when a country experiences asset fire sales, foreign investments exit (fickleness) while domestic investments abroad return home (retrenchment). When countries...

I argue that countries' dollar-denominated net external debt (dollar debt) helps explain the large differences in risk premia across currencies and how U.S. monetary policy affects the global economy. When the U.S. dollar strengthens, the real value of dollar debt increases, weakening the...

Applying basic statistical methods to a large sample of currency crises, it is shown that a variety of measures of monetary policy are significantly related to the outcome of a speculative attack. Unlike in the comparable study of Kraay (1999), discount rates have a significant but...

Output and asset returns are highly positively correlated across the U.S. and the remaining major industrialized countries. Standard business cycle models that assume flexible prices and wages, in the Real Business Cycle (RBC) tradition, have great difficulties explaining this fact. This paper...

We build a model of emerging markets crises which features two types of collateral constraints. Firms in a domestic economy have limited borrowing capacity from international investors. They also have limited borrowing capacity with respect to each other. We study how the presence of and changes...