The increase in the TARGET2 balance for the Bundesbank has led to a debate in Germany about the appropriate interpretation and policy response, if any. In this paper we review the evidence for the current account financing interpretation, and find it wanting in explaining the data in 2012. BIS...

Very low interest rates in major currencies have raised concerns over international credit flows to robustly growing economies in Asia. This paper examines three components of international credit and highlights several of the policy challenges that arise in constraining such credit. Our...

We show in this paper that offshore markets intermediate a large chunk of financial transactions in major reserve currencies such as the US dollar. We argue that, for emerging market economies that are interested in seeing some international use of their currencies, offshore markets can help to...

Measures of de facto capital account openness for China and India raise the question whether the Chinn-Ito measure of de jure capital account openness is useful and whether the Lane-Milesi-Ferretti measure of de facto openness ranks the two countries correctly. We examine eight dimensions of de...

The headline consumer price inflation (CPI) is often considered too noisy, narrowly defined, and/or slowly available for policymaking. On the other hand, traditional core inflation measures may reduce volatility but do not address other issues and may even exclude important information. This...

This paper examines the evolving role of reserve requirements as a policy tool in China. Since 2007, the Chinese central bank (PBC) has relied more on this tool to withdraw domestic liquidity surpluses, as a cheaper substitute for open-market operation instruments in this period of rapid FX...