Official holdings of US dollar reserves are partly invested outside the United States. These offshore investments do not strictly speaking finance the US current account, but do support the US dollar. Offshore holdings grow fast when intervention is large

There is nothing more fundamental to or characteristic of a constitutional system than the techniques it adopts and employs for the selection of its decision makers, be they executive, legislative, or judicial officials. Such techniques can be based on a variety of principles and can be codified...

Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) have steadily increased their importance in the global financial system in the last decade and especially during the financial crisis period. They currently have almost $6 trillion assets under management, which is more than the assets of Private Equity and Hedge...

Starting with the framework of New Institutional Economics, this Comment examines the institutional arrangements of Chinese and U.S. governance, and then scrutinizes their respective policy responses to the financial collapse of 2008. The latent thesis is that, notwithstanding differences in...

Financial system policymakers around the world continue to respond vigorously to the problems in financial markets, financial institutions, and financial system regulation and supervision brought into high relief by the global financial crisis. However, the overall understanding of what those...

In recent months, sovereign wealth funds have received much attention and criticism on the world stage. This paper analyzes these funds from a multidimensional perspective, showing their relative size, origins, history, strategies, and what regulatory oversight they have. Next, it examines why...

The governance of infrastructure institutions in the financial markets – namely exchanges, central counter-parties (CCPs), and central securities depositories (CSDs) – has become a matter of significant commercial, regulatory, legislative, and even political concern. Such institutions play a...

During the 1990s, the concept of catalytic official finance (COF) gained prominence in policy debates. The concept revolves around the idea that the propensity of investors to lend to a country increases when the IMF provides its seal of approval - backed up by only limited official financing -...

Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the failed attempt by France, Israel, and Britain to retake it by force constituted a serious political crisis with significant economic consequences. For the United Kingdom, it engendered a financial crisis as well. That all four of the...