The European sovereign debt crisis revived the discussion concerning pros and cons of exchange rate adjustment in the face of asymmetric shocks. In the spirit of keynes, exit from the euro area is to regain rapidly international competitiveness. In the spirit of Schumpeter, exhange rate...

The paper compares the boom-and-bust cycles in Japan and Europe with respect to the reasons for excessive booms, the characteristics of the crises, and the (potential) effects of the crisis therapies. As in Japan the consequence of expansionary monetary and fiscal policies is the hysteresis of...

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A sequence of crises and emergency interest rate cuts has moved global interest rates towards zero and government debt to historical records. We discuss the available options to exit from unconventional monetary policies and unsustainable government debt. First, we shed light on the probability...

The paper discusses global imbalances under the aspect of an asymmetric world monetary system. It identifies the US and Germany as center countries with rising / high current account deficits (US) and surpluses (Germany). These are matched by current account surpluses of countries stabilizing...

The business cycles theories of Wicksell (1898), Schumpeter (1912), Mises (1912), Hayek (1929, 1935) and Minsky (1986, 1992) explain business cycles by distorted prices on capital markets, buoyant credit expansion and overinvestment. The exuberance during the boom endogenously causes the...

Im November dieses Jahres sollen auf dem G-20-Gipfel in Cannes Vorschläge zur Reform des internationalen Währungssystems vorgelegt werden. Wie sollte ein zukünftiges globales Wechselkursregime gestaltet werden? Jörg Asmussen, Staatssekretär im Bundesministerium der Finanzen, unterstreicht,...

Der Druck auf die chinesische Regierung, die Wechselkursbindung des chinesischen Yuan an den US Dollar aufzugeben, ist groß. Seitdem der Dollar unter kontinuierlichem Abwertungsdruck steht, wird in den westlichen Industriestaaten Chinas Festkurs einer merkantilistischen Handelspolitik...

This paper studies the role of the yen/dollar exchange rate in the Bank of Japan?s monetary policy reaction function. In contrast to prior estimations of reaction functions based on the Taylor-rule, we allow for regime shifts by estimating rolling coefficients from January 1974 to March 1999....