In analysing the performance of the international monetary and financial system (IMFS), too much attention has been paid to the current account and far too little to the capital account. This is true of both formal analytical models and historical narratives. This approach may be reasonable when...

This essay argues that the Achilles heel of the international monetary and financial system is that it amplifies the “excess financial elasticity” of domestic policy regimes, ie it exacerbates their inability to prevent the build-up of financial imbalances, or outsize financial cycles, that...

This paper argues that changes in the financial and monetary regimes since the early 1980s may have made it more likely that financial factors in general, and the booms and busts in credit and asset prices in particular, act as drivers of economic fluctuations. As a result, the current...

How does the management and resolution of the current crisis compare with the response of the Nordic countries in the early 1990s, widely regarded as exemplary? We argue that, while intervention has been prompter, the measures taken so far remain less comprehensive and in-depth. In particular,...

Over the last decade or so, addressing financial instability has become a policy priority. Despite the efforts made, policymakers are still a long way from developing a satisfactory operational framework. A major challenge complicating this task is the “fuzziness” with which financial...

An operational macroprudential approach to financial stability requires tools that attribute system-wide risk to individual institutions. Making use of constructs from game theory, we propose an attribution methodology that has a number of appealing features: it can be used in conjunction with...

What are liquidity crises? And what can be done to address them? This short article brings together some personal reflections on this issue, largely based on previous work. In the process, it questions a number of commonly held beliefs that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The...