The U.S. dollar exchange rate clears the global market for dollar-denominated safe assets. We find that shifts in the demand and supply of safe dollar assets are important drivers of variation in the dollar exchange rate, bond yields, and other global financial variables. An increase in the...

I survey the role of geopolitics and sanctions risk in shaping the U.S. dollar's status as the primary currency used for international reserves. Without changes in the economic incentives for holding FX reserves in U.S. dollar assets, an increased threat of sanctions is unlikely to drastically...

Tiny changes in the American monetary policy can have dramatic effects on the rest of the world because of dollar's double role of national and international currency. This is the Triffin dilemma. The paper shows how it works through three examples: price of commodities, dollarization, and the...

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

The past two decades have seen the construction of a tiered system of international liquidity provision, the first tier including those whose credit is sufficient for a swap line with the Fed, the second tier including those who can offer acceptable collateral to the Fed, and the third tier...

Central banks actively engage in sterilized foreign exchange market intervention despite numerous empirical studies indicating that these operations do not systematically affect the exchange rate. Are these policies misguided and central bankers irrational? Or is evidence showing the...

This paper uses recently released official data on the foreign exchange market interventions of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) in the yen/U.S. dollar market during the period 1991-2001 in order to examine the motivation for the intervention policy of the BoJ. We also compare the intervention policy of...

The financial crisis that began in late 2007 with the decline in the United States (U.S.) subprime mortgage markets, quickly spread to other markets and eventually disrupted the interbank funding markets in the U.S. as well as overseas. To address the strain in the U.S. dollar (USD) funding...