Most trade is invoiced in very few currencies. Despite this, the Mundell-Fleming benchmark and its variants focus on pricing in the producer's currency or in local currency. We model instead a 'dominant currency paradigm' for small open economies characterized by three features: pricing in a...

The current environment is characterized by low real rates and by policy rates close to or at their lower bound in all major financial areas. We analyze these unusual economic conditions from a historical perspective and draw some implications for external imbalances, safe asset demand and the...

This paper explores the consequences of extremely low equilibrium real interest rates in a world with integrated but heterogenous capital markets and nominal rigidities. In this context, we establish five main results: (i) Economies experiencing liquidity traps pull others into a similar...

We provide an overview of the recent developments of the literature on the determinants of long term capital flows, global imbalances and valuation effects. We present the main stylized facts of the new international financial landscape in which external balance sheets of countries have grown in...

This paper studies the geography of wealth transfers during the 2008 global financial crisis. We construct valuation changes on bilateral external positions in equity, direct investment and portfolio debt at the height of the crisis to map who benefited and who lost on their external exposure....

A key precursor of twentieth-century financial crises in emerging and advanced economies alike was the rapid buildup of leverage. Those emerging economies that avoided leverage booms during the 2000s also were most likely to avoid the worst effects of the twenty-first century's first global...

In this paper we argue that the persistent global imbalances, the subprime crisis, and the volatile oil and asset prices that followed it, are tightly interconnected. They all stem from a global environment where sound and liquid financial assets are in scarce supply

Three of the most important recent facts in global macroeconomics -- the sustained rise in the US current account deficit, the stubborn decline in long run real rates, and the rise in the share of US assets in global portfolio -- appear as anomalies from the perspective of conventional wisdom...

Does the center country of the International Monetary System enjoy an "exorbitant privilege" that significantly weakens its external constraint as has been asserted in some European quarters? Using a newly constructed dataset, we perform a detailed analysis of the historical evolution of US...

Recent theories of crisis put lending booms at the root of financial collapses. Yet lending booms may be a natural consequence of economic development and fluctuations. So are lending booms dangerous? In this paper, we investigate empirically this question using a broad sample of lending boom...