[eng] The Rise and Fall of Sovereign Wealth Accumulation : Causes and Consequences . This paper examines the sources of the rapid build-up in official foreign assets of recent years. Foreign exchange intervention and burgeoning petrodollar receipts -the two main sources of financing for recent...

[eng] This paper examines the sources of the rapid build-up in official foreign assets of recent years. Foreign exchange intervention and burgeoning petrodollar receipts - the two main sources of financing for recent official outflows - have very different implications for domestic monetary...

Countries in the euro area periphery borrowed heavily from abroad in the years leading up to the sovereign debt crisis, largely to finance increased consumption and housing investment. When the crisis hit in 2010, capital flight by private investors forced these countries to bring domestic...

Sustained large U.S. current account deficits have led some economists and policymakers to worry that future current account adjustment could occur through a sudden and disruptive depreciation of the dollar and a sharp drop in U.S. consumption. Two factors that, to date, have cast doubt on such...

Intuition suggests that a strengthening of the yen should moderate Japan's trade surplus by reducing the price competitiveness of Japanese goods. Yet the Japanese merchandise trade surplus more than doubled from 1990 to 1993 while the yen appreciated roughly 30 percent against the dollar. This...

Despite a steep drop in the dollar's value, imports continued to grow much faster than domestic sales after 1985. The resilience in the demand for imports raised concern that foreign producers in the first half of the 1980s had gained long-term advantages in U.S. markets that diminished the...