The paper reviews the recent literature on exchange rate target zones and on speculative attacks on fixed exchange rates. The influential Krugman model of exchange rate target zones has two main results, namely that credible target zones stabilize exchange rates more than fundamentals (the...

This chapter discusses the operation and collapse of fixed exchange rate regimes. It reports recent research contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of a fixed exchange rate system. These contributions can be placed readily into two categories research on target zones and research on...

The revived Bretton Woods framework we proposed in 2003 remains a useful way to understand the international financial system. We document that the system survived the 2008 crisis. Looking forward, we argue that the system will continue to evolve as we expected. China is likely to graduate from...

In 1790, Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, initiated a program to refund the U.S. debt. Debt that had sold at 75% discount two years earlier would be refunded at par into new funded debt of the new federal government. All foreign indebtedness would be...

Thia paper analyzes U.S. monetary-financial policy in the period leading up to the Treasury-Fed Accord. We model policy as an implicit target zone for the price level and an explicit zone for interest rates, and the difficulties on the eve of the Accord as an incipient run on a collapsing...

In this paper we generalize the target zone exchange rate as model formalized by Krugman (1988b) to include finite-sized interventions in defense of the zone. The main contributions of these pages consist of linking the recent developments in the theory of target zones to the mirror-image theory...

In the literature on speculative attacks on a fixed exchange rate, it is usually assumed that the monetary authority responsible for fixing the exchange rate reacts passively to the monetary disruption caused by the attack. This assumption is grossly at odds with actual experience where...

Banks are unique among financial institutions because they are the cheapest source of liquidity in the economy. Banks choose to hold reserves to facilitate settlement of end-of-day net due to positions arising from payments operations. Money market substitutes for bank liabilities do not escape...