With heterogeneous productivity and sticky prices in the short run, exchange rate changes can generate real effects on agents in the economy; the result is that the currency regime becomes a policy variable amenable to political competition. This paper discusses how special interests and...

"This book started out as a biography of the dollar, not of a man. It was intended to be an international version of the story I had told in The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort (2011). That book was a biography of the Fed, as seen through the analytical lens of...