Global Implications of Self-Oriented National Monetary Rules

It is well known that if international linkages are relatively small, the potential gains to international monetary policy coordination are typically quite limited. But what if goods and financial markets are tightly linked? Is it then problematic if countries unilaterally design their institutions for monetary stabilization? Are the stabilization gains from having separate currencies largely squandered in the absence of effective international monetary coordination? We argue that under plausible assumptions the answer is no. Unless risk aversion is very high, lack of coordination in rule setting is a second-order problem compared to the overall gains from monetary policy stabilization.

Serial Default and Its Remedies

The main theme of this paper is that debt cycles deeply entrenched in the process of development, and one must be careful about trusting magic elixirs that purport to finesse the problem entirely. Middle income countries nascent political and economic institutions, often simultaneously face extremely high degrees of economic uncertainty, not least stemming from the extraordinary volatility of world commodity and agricultural prices. At the same time, many of these countries have exhausted autarkic growth strategies, and find themselves desparately needing to deepen financial markets in order to efficiently allocate scarce saving and expand growth. But this process of deepening – often associated with increased international capital market integration – almost invariably exposes them to heightened risks. And, unfortunately, once a country suffers one bout of default, its institutions and markets become weaker and more vulnerable to more debt problems, a phenomenon Reinhart, Rogoff and Savastano term “Debt Intolerance.”

Debt and Growth Revisited

In a recent paper, we studied economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. The public discussion of our empirical strategy and results has been somewhat muddled. Here, we attempt to clarify matters, particularly with respect sample coverage (our evidence encompasses forty-four countries over two centuries--not just the United States), debt-growth causality (our book emphasizes the bi-directional nature of the relationship), as well as nonlinearities in the debt-growth connection and thresholds evident in the data (absolutely central points that seem to have been lost in some commentary.) In addition to clarifying the earlier results, this paper enriches our original analysis by providing further discussion of the high debt (over 90 percent of GDP) episodes and their incidence. Some of the implications of our analysis, including for the United States, are taken up in the final section.debt, growth, crisis, advanced economies, historical

This Time It’s Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly-Chapter 1

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. We stress that premise is wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. We argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned. We document that financial fallouts occur in clusters and strike with surprisingly consistent frequency, duration, and ferocity. We examine the patterns of currency crashes, high and hyperinflation, and government defaults on international and domestic debts--as well as the cycles in housing and equity prices, capital flows, unemployment, and government revenues around these crises. While countries do weather their financial storms, we show that short memories make it all too easy for crises to recur.banking and financial crises, currency crash, inflation, debt, default, recession

Sovereign Debt Repurchases: No Cure for Overhang

We show, in a reasonably general model, that if a highly indebted country has good investment projects available to it, then it will not benefit from using any of its resources to buy back debt at market prices. Debt buybacks and debt-equity swaps only make sense for the country if these programs are heavily subsidized by creditors. This result holds for all buyback programs large and small, so long as they involve voluntary creditor participation and are not part of a larger deal including offsetting concessions from lenders. Our analysis therefore casts doubt on the popular argument that unilateral debt repurchases benefit HICs by relieving "debt overhang".

New Directions for Stochastic Open Economy Models

The paper develops a simple stochastic new open economy macroeconomic model based on sticky nominal wages. Explicit solution of the wage-setting problem under uncertainty allows one to analyze the effects of the monetary regime on welfare, expected output, and the expected terms of trade. Despite the potential interplay between imperfections due to sticky wages and monopoly, the optimal monetary policy rule has a closed-form solution. To motivate our model, we show that observed correlations between terms of trade and exchange rates are more consistent with our traditional assumptions about nominal rigidities than with a popular alternative based on local-currency pricing.