Over the past 15 years, long-term interest rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1970s. This paper explores possible shifts in global savings and investment that have led to this fall in the world real interest rate. There are several key findings. First, the authors identify the...

It is widely held that currencies of surplus countries, such as China, cannot enjoy wide international use. We argue that the eurodollar market has had little to do with the direction of net capital flows or the US current account balance. It has played different roles over the past 38 years,...

The year 2009 is a propitious time to evaluate systems of investor protection in financial markets as global bank losses exceed the 1 trillion mark and market losses equally exceed the 1 trillion mark. Prior to the Global Financial Crisis, the European Union enacted sweeping legislation to...

This paper analyzes banking crises using a quantitative model with equilibrium default for both firms and banks. The main results are: 1) small open economies have larger banking crises than closed or large economies. Constant international rates do not mitigate interbank spreads and amplify...

This paper examines the macro-spanning hypothesis for bond returns in international markets. Based on a large panel of real-time macro variables that are not subject to revisions, wefind that global macro factors have predictive power for bond returns unspanned by yield factors.Furthermore, we...

This paper analyses the discussion of a substitution account in the 1970s and how the account might have performed had it been agreed in 1980. The substitution account would have allowed central banks to diversify away from the dollar into the IMF's Special Drawing Right (SDR), comprised of US...

Financial markets have experienced unprecedented transformations, signs of which have emerged since the late 1970s. In recent years substantial consolidation occurred. In response to changes in macroeconomic variables, such as GDP, industrial production, inflation and the political business...