In February 1998, after consulting one of the authors of this article, President Suharto and his Economic and Monetary Resilience Council advocated the establishment of a fixed-rate currency board system in which the Indonesian rupiah would be backed by and convertible into U.S. dollars as a...

A currency board is a monetary institution that issues notes and coins which are fully convertible into a reserve currency at a fixed rate on demand. Reserves are equal to 100 per cent, or slightly more, of a board's notes and coins. There have been over seventy currency boards and all have...

During the past year, the press has had a field day pummeling “derivatives.” The Wall Street Journal has even joined in the fun. The grist for the journalists' mills has been provided by the big losses on derivatives reported by Metallgessellschaft, Proctor & Gamble, Air Products, Gibson...

The collapse of Enron Corporation has been portrayed as the result of accounting fraud and greed. Not everything that Enron did, however, was wrong or fraudulent. Fraud contributed to the timing of Enron's failure but was not the root cause of that failure. In analyzing Enron, it is critically...