For more than two decades now, current-account imbalances are a crucial issue in the international policy debate as they threaten the stability of the world economy. More recently, the government debt crisis of the European Union shows that internal current account imbalances inside a currency...

In this study, the main purpose is to analyze the factors that stimulate the probability of financial crises. The period of analysis covers the years of 1970-2008, thereby including the impact of recent global financial crisis. The analysis aims to make a comparison for the developed and...

This article tracks the history of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years. We show that the financial imbalances that erupted in the financial crisis of 2008 were long in the making and preceded the emergence of global imbalances in the 2000s. These new dynamics...

This paper seeks to draw lessons from the IMF’s experience in handling financial crises around the globe over the past ten years that are relevant to the challenges faced by countries in Latin America, especially in the wake of the recent crisis in Argentina. Experience suggests that...

This paper recounts Chile’s experience with capital account policies since the 1990s. We present how two external shocks were confronted under very different macroeconomic and capital account frameworks. We show that during the 1997-98 Asian-LTCM-Russia crisis, a closed capital account and...

This paper examines the financial stability implications arising from securitization markets, with one eye on the past and another on the future. The paper begins by deriving a number of “lessons learned†based on an examination of key industry developments in the years before the...

The paper analyses the vulnerabilities which can be brought about by the structure and trend of the foreign trade and the external debt, and by the exchange rate to the Romanian economy, in the period after our country's accession to the European Union. The structure and the trend of the current...