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Working Paper
U.S. intervention during the Bretton Wood Era:1962-1973
By the early 1960s, outstanding U.S. dollar liabilities began to exceed the U.S. gold stock, suggesting that the United States could not completely maintain its pledge to convert dollars into gold at the official price. This raised uncertainty about the Bretton Woods parity grid, and speculation seemed to grow. In response, the Federal Reserve instituted a series of swap lines to provide central banks with cover for unwanted, but temporary accumulations of dollars and to provide foreign central banks with dollar funds to finance their own interventions. The Treasury also began intervening in ...
Journal Article
Monetary effects of the treasury sale of gold
Journal Article
An appropriate international currency - gold, dollars, or SDRs?
Working Paper
De-Dollarization? Diversification? Exploring Central Bank Gold Purchases and the Dollar's Role in International Reserves
I examine how governments have managed their holdings of gold and dollar reserves in recent decades, a period when gold’s share of aggregate international reserves rose and the dollar’s share fell. Using data on central banks’ reserve currency composition and official sector purchases of U.S. assets, I argue that gold reserve accumulation is generally not associated with de-dollarization of international reserves at the country level, except in a few prominent cases. Instead, gold purchases are more consistent with most countries pursuing a modest diversification of international ...
Journal Article
Recent gold movements: French financial developments
Working Paper
Can government gold be put to better use?: Qualitative and quantitative policies
Gold has both private uses (depletion uses and service uses) and government uses. It can be obtained from mines with high extraction costs (about $300 per ounce) or from above ground stocks with no extraction costs. Governments still store massive stocks of gold. Making government gold available for private uses through some combination of sales and loans raises welfare from private uses by removing two types of inefficiencies. For given private uses, there is a production inefficiency if costless government gold is withheld while costly gold is taken from mines. There are use inefficiencies ...
Working Paper
Implied volatility from options on gold futures: do statistical forecasts add value or simply paint the lilly?
Consistent with findings in other markets, implied volatility is a biased predictor of the realized volatility of gold futures. No existing explanation?including a price of volatility risk?can completely explain the bias, but much of this apparent bias can be explained by persistence and estimation error in implied volatility. Statistical criteria reject the hypothesis that implied volatility is informationally efficient with respect to econometric forecasts. But delta hedging exercises indicate that such econometric forecasts have no incremental economic value. Thus, statistical measures of ...
Journal Article
Gold, capital flow, and foreign trade during war
Journal Article
International gold and dollar flows
Journal Article
Safe-Haven Performance in the Age of Bitcoin
In past periods of financial stress, investors seeking “safe havens” have shifted toward government bonds and gold. In recent years, some have questioned whether Bitcoin could also serve as a safe haven. We compare the behavior of government bonds, gold, and Bitcoin from January 1995 through February 2020 and find that the 10-year Treasury note behaved like a safe haven consistently, gold occasionally, and Bitcoin never. During March 2020, however, none of the assets can be classified with confidence as a safe haven.