In most countries, the central bank is required to hold reserve assets as a means of providing credibility for the value of the fiat currency. These assets can be in the form of gold, foreign exchange or some other internationally recognised reserve asset and are held to permit the country to...

This paper provides a historical background to contemporary debates on the international monetary system: their genesis, similarities, and differences of problems it has faced at different times. It looks sequentially at the design of the Bretton Woods system; the tensions it faced since the...

This paper studies how the maturity structure of external debt is affected by international reserves and how they reinforce financial stability through a more crisis-resilient maturity structure. We show in an illustrative theoretical model that reserves lengthen the maturity of external debt...

The policy measures taken since the financial crisis have greatly expanded the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and have thus raised the level of aggregate bank reserves as well. Over the same period there has been a significant shift in the timing of payments made over the Federal...

This article contributes to the debate about the impact of the U.S. fracking boom on U.S. oil imports, on Arab oil exports, and on the global price of crude oil. First, I investigate the extent to which this oil boom has caused Arab oil exports to the United States to decline since late 2008....

We evaluate the impact of the global financial crisis (GFC) and recent structural changes in the patterns of hoarding international reserves (IR). We confirm that the determinants of IR hoarding evolve with developments in the global economy. During the pre-GFC period of 1999-2006, gross saving...

Some economies in East Asia have built up large amounts of foreign exchange reserves in the past decades. Holding large amounts of reserves helped these economies to stabilize their macro economy and exchange rates under periods of market stress and rapid shifts in relative economic size....

Foreword -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Contributors -- 1. From great depression to great recession: an overview / Atish R. Ghosh, Mahvash S. Qureshi -- Part I. Prespectives from the past: secular stagnation and asymmetric burden of adjustment -- 2. Learning lessons from previous crises: the...