Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods Global International System in 1971, the world economy has experienced significant currency volatility. The major economies of the world have addressed such volatility differently. The EU has chosen to follow a monetary union and introduced successfully a...

The behavior of gold as an investment asset has been researched extensively. For the very long run, that is several decades, gold does not outperform equities. However, for shorter periods, gold responds to fears of inflation, stock market corrections, currency crises and financial instabilities...

During the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009, the price of crude oil dropped markedly from about $140 per barrel in June 2008 to about $40 in early 2009. As Quantitative Easing allowed the U.S. economy to stabilize and return to slow growth, oil prices increased and averaged about $100 during...

This paper argues that the global monetary system has exhibited significant instability since the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime in 1971. The recent challenge for economists and policy makers is the creation of a global monetary system that offers greater exchange rate stability without...

We perform non-linearity tests using daily data for leading currencies that include the Australian dollar, British pound, Brazilian real, Canadian dollar, euro, Japanese yen, Mexican peso, and the Swiss franc to resolve the issue of whether these currencies are driven by fundamentals or...

This paper investigates inter-relationships among the price behavior of oil, gold and the euro using time series and neural network methodologies. Traditionally gold is a leading indicator of future inflation. Both the demand and supply of oil as a key global commodity are impacted by...

Oil prices increased dramatically during 2004-6. Industry experts initially attributed these price increases to fundamental factors such as the rise in global demand, but also because of disruptions in the supply of oil. The price increases however were so substantial that additional factors are...

The standard hypothesis concerning the behavior of asset returns states that they follow a random walk in discrete time or a Brownian motion in continuous time. The Brownian motion process is characterized by a quantity, called the Hurst exponent, which is related to some fractal aspects of the...

This paper reviews both theoretical and empirical issues regarding inflation and evaluates the contribution of Kyrtsou and Labys. Analytically it is very difficult to propose a general theory of inflation because as economies evolve over time both new causes of inflation emerge and the...

In this chapter the authors seek to provide a general overview of the international markets for foreign exchange (FX) and FX derivatives as well as the theoretical relationships that tie these markets together with interest rates and central bank policies. The first section provides a brief...