Documents foreign exchange 14 results

"The workhorse open-economy macro model suggests that capital inflows are contractionary because they appreciate the currency and reduce net exports. Emerging market policy makers however believe that inflows lead to credit booms and rising output, and the evidence appears to go their way. To reconcile theory and reality, we extend the set of assets included in the Mundell-Fleming model to include both bonds and non-bonds. At a given policy rate, inflows may decrease the rate on non-bonds, reducing the cost of financial intermediation, potentially offsetting the contractionary impact of appreciation. We explore the implications theoretically and empirically, and find support for the key predictions in the data."

"The Swiss National Bank's January 2015 decision to abandon the Swiss franc's peg to the euro led to short-term chaos in exchange markets and had a dampening effect on the Swiss economy. Some economists suggested Switzerland was poised to enter a sustained period of stagnation à la Japan. The decision also reignited policy debate on the benefi ts and drawbacks to central bank intervention in currency markets. While such intervention can be justifi ed in certain situations, such as if the market is producing the “wrong rate”? it can also impose significant economic costs. The ECB's recently implemented quantitative easing programme has been regarded by many as a thinly disguised attempt to weaken the euro in order to improve the eurozone's competitiveness. However, the euro's recent weakening began well before the ECB announced its programme; moreover, previous rounds of quantitative easing by other central banks have had minimal impact on exchange rates.Keith Pilbeam, City University London, UK."

"A striking and unexpected feature of the financial crisis has been the sharp appreciation of the US dollar against virtually all currencies globally. The paper finds that negative US-specific macroeconomic shocks during the crisis have triggered a significant strengthening of the US dollar, rather than a weakening. Macroeconomic fundamentals and financial exposure of individual countries are found to have played a key role in the transmission process of US shocks: in particular countries with low FX reserves, weak current account positions and high direct financial exposure vis-à-vis the United States have experienced substantially larger currency depreciations during the crisis overall, and to US shocks in particular."

"In this path-breaking book, the author argues that European countries' political-economic policies, practices, and discourses have changed profoundly in response to globalization and Europeanization, but they have not converged. Although national policies may now be more similar, especially where they follow from common European policies, they are not the same. National practices, although moving in the same general direction toward greater market orientation, continue to be differentiable into not just one or even two but three varieties of capitalism. And national discourses that generate and legitimate changes in policies and practices not only remain distinct, they matter. The book is a tour de force which combines sophisticated theoretical insights and innovative methods to show that European countries generally, but in particular Britain, France, and Germany , have had very different experiences of economic adjustment, and will continue to do so into the future. "