Official holdings of US dollar reserves are partly invested outside the United States. These offshore investments do not strictly speaking finance the US current account, but do support the US dollar. Offshore holdings grow fast when intervention is large

Starting with the framework of New Institutional Economics, this Comment examines the institutional arrangements of Chinese and U.S. governance, and then scrutinizes their respective policy responses to the financial collapse of 2008. The latent thesis is that, notwithstanding differences in...

This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. We compile a new database of 220,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering 91 countries. Our main insight is that, as in equity...

This paper presents VAR results on the recent economic history of the USand focuses on the dependence of US macro financial variables on international capital flows. Both gross and net flows are included in the analysis. The results indicate that cross-border funding has affected the build-up in...

This paper overviews different exit strategies for the U.S. from the debt-overhang, and analyses their implications for emerging markets and global stability. These strategies are discussed in the context of the debates about secular-stagnation versus debt-overhang, the fiscal theory of the...

Since 1944, United States financing of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been appropriated and approved in Congress by roll-call vote. If voting to increase funds to the IMF is viewed as an observable signal of “support” for the IMF, these votes provide a historical record of...

Public pension funds are, by far, the world's preeminent asset owners, with more than $ 25 trillions in combined assets. The largest pension funds are found in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands and the UK ("pension superpowers"). How they are managed, their funding...

In this paper we analyze whether IMF conditionality is exclusively designed in line with observable economic indicators or, alternatively, whether it is partly driven by its major shareholder, the US. A panel data analysis of 206 letters of intent from 38 countries over the period 4/1997-2/2003...

We present a weekly structural Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model of the US crude oil market. Exploiting weekly data we can explain short-run crude oil price dynamics, including those related with the COVID-19 pandemic and with the Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The model is set identified with a...