Category Archives: International Economics

Here’s a price list at the McDonald’s on Barfusserplatz in Basel on the day of the BIS annual general meeting one year ago and today.  Big Mac cost 6.50 Swiss francs on both days. Now that’s price stability. At an exchange … Continue reading →

A fascinating and useful new e-book, The Bretton Woods Transcripts, has just been published by the Center for Financial Stability (CFS). It is the first publication of the transcripts of the famous international meeting that took place nearly 70 years … Continue reading →

My Wall Street Journal article yesterday Monetary Policy and the Next Crisis touches on a growing research area in international finance that focusses on gross capital flows as distinct from the current account. For example, in his Ely Lecture at … Continue reading →

Each year the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) hosts the world’s central bankers–the BIS shareholders–at their Annual General Meeting in Basel, Switzerland. At the meeting held today, the BIS issued their Annual Report which addresses key monetary policy issues. BIS analyses … Continue reading →

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of Argentina’s massive sovereign debt default, an event with many lessons for the European sovereign debt crisis of today, though analogies are far from perfect. First, as has been discussed and debated on planet … Continue reading →

Few Americans now remember that the United States launched its first post-9/11 attack on terrorists from a very unusual front—the financial front. As President George W. Bush put it, “the first shot in the war was when we started cutting … Continue reading →

In this Bloomberg Echoes post, I argue that the United States should do whatever it can to promote economic freedom in the post-Jasmine Revolution Middle East and North Africa, and strongly support economic leaders who are committed to creating a … Continue reading →

The plan to use Moammar Gadhafi’s frozen assets to fund the Libyan rebels faces legal obstacles according to this weekend’s Wall Street Journal story “Obstacles Loom on Path To Funding Libyans.” This reminds me of the plan to use Saddam … Continue reading →

Yesterday’s meeting of the G20 finance ministers in China broadened the ongoing “rebalancing current accounts” agenda to consider international monetary policy reform. But few central bank governors came so an important monetary policy issue could not be discussed: the international … Continue reading →

One of the things I like most about blogging is that I can post from anywhere in the world—Tokyo, Milan, Washington—not just from my home or office at Stanford. Well not exactly. This past week I could not post from … Continue reading →