Brazil is walking on a fence between sustainable and unsustainable public-debt dynamics. How it treads could affect not only its own economic prosperity but that of its neighbors, emerging markets in general, and U.S. financial institutions in particular. Relatively small improvements in...

The deterioration in the U.S. balance of payments after 1957 and an accelerating loss of gold reserves prompted U.S. monetary authorities to undertake foreign-exchange-market interventions beginning in 1961. We discuss the events leading up to these interventions, the institutional arrangements...

A vast literature on the effects of sterilized intervention by the monetary authorities in the foreign exchange markets concludes that intervention systematically moves the spot exchange rate only if it is publicly announced, coordinated across countries, and consistent with the underlying...

By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation...

Using a set of standard success criteria, we show that Riksbank foreign-exchange interventions between 1993 and 2002 lacked forecast value; that is, the observed number of successes was not significantly greater - and usually substantially smaller - than the number one would anticipate given the...

During the early part of the Great Inflation (1965-1975), the Federal Reserve undertook even-keel operations to assist the US Treasury’s coupon security sales. Accordingly, the central bank delayed any tightening of monetary policy and permanently injected reserves into the banking system....