At the NBER IFM Summer Institute session on exchange rates yesterday, the debate over the use of survey data rekindled. In Exchange Rate and Interest Rate Disconnect, Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan and Liliana Varela used survey data on exchange rate depreciation. The discussant Adrian Verdelhan (MIT) and audience members questioned whether such data actually measured what we thought they measured market expectations.
Category Archives: international
The New Fama Puzzle Persists
Libra: economics of Facebook’s cryptocurrency
Facebook last week announced plans for Libra, a new global cryptocurrency. The name seems to be a marriage of the words “livre”, the French currency throughout the Middle Ages based on a pound of silver, and “liber,” which is Latin for “free.” Facebook claims that Libra will give the freedom to easily transmit funds across borders to the 1.7 billion adults in the world without access to traditional banks.
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Guest Contribution: “A Tale of Two Surplus Countries: China and Germany”
Today we are fortunate to present a guest contribution written by Yin-Wong Cheung (City University of Hong Kong), Sven Steinkamp (Universität Osnabrück) and Frank Westermann (Universität Osnabrück). This contribution is based on a paper forthcoming in the Open Economies Review.
How Trade Uncertainty Is Crushing Economic Optimism
“Exchange rate models for a new era: Major and emerging market currencies”
That’s the title of a forthcoming special section in the Journal of International Money and Finance. Here’s the introductory article to the special issue [link].
Disruptions to financial markets, elevated risk levels, and unconventional monetary policies pursued by central banks have altered the landscape of international finance. The near zero and negative interest rates in several key advanced economies, for instance, present a new environment for pricing financial assets and shock transmission. The ultra-accommodative policy stance has affected exchange rates via, for instance, its effects on expectations, capital flows and global liquidity. As a result, new challenges in modelling equilibrium exchange rates, assessing exchange rate misalignment, and evaluating their roles in re-balancing external imbalances, and shock transmission have arisen. Against this backdrop, a conference was convened to provide a platform for discussing recent advances in modelling exchange rates, from perspectives of both major and emerging market currencies. This special issue of the Journal of International Money and Finance consists of eight papers presented at a conference organized by Global Research Unit at Department of Economics and Finance, City University of Hong Kong, Bank for International Settlements, Asian Office, and Centre for Economic Policy Research, with advice from Nelson Mark, and held at City University of Hong Kong, May 18–19, 2017. The topics covered advances in empirical exchange rate modeling, the effect of news, risk and uncertainty on currency values, order flow and exchange rates, monetary policy and interest rate parity, and the behavior of the Renminbi duringthe post-crisis. We describe below the main take-aways from these papers. …
The entire article is here (ungated for 50 days). special issue [link]. Published online: Adler, Lama & Medina, Berg & Mark, Cao, Huang, Liu & MacDonald, Cheung, Chinn, Garcia Pascual & Zhang (ungated for 50 days), Cheung, Fatum & Yamamoto, Engel, Lee, Liu, Liu & Wu, Krohn & Moore, and McCauley & Shu.
Who’s Getting the Rents?
The import quota rents that is. From Brian Riley/NTUF:
The IMF WEO on Brexit
What did the UK just dodge (temporarily)?
Forward Rate Bias over a Third of a Century
Just updated/cleaned and extended the survey and forward rate data used in Chinn and Frankel (2019) (discussed in this post). Here are preliminary results regard forward rate bias, both pre- and post-crisis.
When the Textbook Is Right: Implications of the Trump Fiscal/Trade Regime
Today we learned that through March, the Federal budget deficit was 15% larger than the corresponding point in the last fiscal year — as expected given a not particularly stimulative tax cut (so much for tax cuts paying for themselves, as Stephen Moore claimed) and the ending of spending restraints. The dollar remains at elevated levels, as interest rates have risen. The trade deficit, excluding petroleum, continues to deteriorate. As I explained to my macro class today… it’s all textbook (notes).