Global current account imbalances have been at the forefront of policy debates over the past few years. Many observers have recently singled them out as a key factor contributing to the global financial crisis. Current account surpluses in several emerging market economies are said to have...

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the "excess financial elasticity" of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that lead...

In analyzing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

This essay was published as part of a law review symposium that evaluated my work on theregulation of large, complex financial institutions. Part I of my essay discusses the other articlespublished in the symposium issue and describes their relationship to my own work. Part IIanalyzes the global...

Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilizing for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may trigger severe recessions. Policy responses were more complex for developed economies with very low interest rates after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). We document, however,...

One of the main economic villains before the crisis was the presence of large “global imbalances.” The concern was that the U.S. would experience a sudden stop of capital flows, which would unavoidably drag the world economy into a deep recession. However, when the crisis finally did come,...

We study how foreign financial developments influence the conditional distribution of domestic GDP growth. Within a quantile regression setup, we propose a method to parsimoniously account for foreign vulnerabilities using bilateral-exposure weights when assessing downside macroeconomic risks....

Global risk-off shocks can be highly destabilising for financial markets and, absent an adequate policy response, may trigger severe recessions. In Caballero and Kamber (2019), we document that the unconventional policies adopted by the main central banks were effective in containing asset price...

Textual analysis of the NBER Working Papers published during 1999-2016 is done to assess the effects of the 2007-2009 crisis on the academic literature. The volume of crisis-related WPs is counter-cyclical, lagging the financial-instability-index. WPs by the Monetary-Economics, Asset-Pricing,...

The crypto boom and crash of 2020-22 demonstrated that (i) cryptocurrencies with fluctuating values are extremely risky and highly volatile assets, and (ii) cryptocurrencies known as “stablecoins” are vulnerable to systemic runs whenever there are serious doubts about the adequacy of...