This Chartbook, which is a companion piece to Carmen M. Reinhart and Takeshi Tashiro (2013) "Crowding Out Redefined: The Role of Reserve Accumulation," focuses on nine Asian economies: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Like its predecessor...

We document that the global scope and depth of the crisis the began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007 is unprecedented in the post World War II era and, as such, the most relevant comparison benchmark is the Great Depression (or the Great Contraction, as...

Sovereign governments owe debt to many foreign creditors and can choose which creditors to favor when making payments. This paper documents the de facto seniority structure of sovereign debt using new data on defaults (missed payments or arrears) and creditor losses in debt restructuring...

How will sovereign debt markets evolve in the 21st century? We survey how the literature has responded to the Eurozone debt crisis, placing "lessons learned" in historical perspective. The crisis featured: (i) the return of debt problems to advanced economies; (ii) a bank-sovereign "doom-loop"...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments' popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

This paper employs high frequency transactions data on the world's oldest and most extensive centralized peer-to-peer Bitcoin market, which enables trade in the currencies of more than 135 countries. We develop an algorithm that allows, with high probability, the detection of "crypto vehicle...

This paper employs an updated algorithm and database for classifying exchange rate and anchor currency choice, to explore the evolution of the global exchange rate system, including parallel rates, capital controls and reserves. In line with a large recent literature, we find that the dollar has...

Debt in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) is at its highest level in half a century. In about nine out of 10 EMDEs, debt is higher now than it was in 2010 and, in half of the EMDEs, debt is more than 30 percentage points of gross domestic product higher. Historically, elevated...

On the twentieth anniversary of its inception, the euro has yet to expand its role as an international currency. We document this fact with a wide range of indicators including its role as an anchor or reference in exchange rate arrangements--which we argue is a portmanteau measure--and as a...

Over the 21st century, and especially since 2014, global exchange rate volatility has been trending downwards, notably among the core G3 currencies (dollar, euro and the yen), and to some extent the G4 (including China). This stability continued through the Covid-19 recession to date: unusual,...