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Working Paper
Sudden Stops and Optimal Foreign Exchange Intervention
This paper shows how foreign exchange intervention can be used to avoid a sudden stop in capital flows in a small open emerging market economy. The model is based around the concept of an under-borrowing equilibrium defined by Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (2020). With a low elasticity of substitution between traded and non-traded goods, real exchange rate depreciation may generate a precipitous drop in aggregate demand and a tightening of borrowing constraints, leading to an equilibrium with an inefficiently low level of borrowing. The central bank can preempt this deleveraging cycle through ...
Report
Drivers of Dollar Share in Foreign Exchange Reserves
The share of U.S. dollar assets in the official foreign exchange reserve portfolios of central banks, at times, is taken as an indicator of dollar status. We show that the observed decline in aggregate U.S. dollar shares is not from a systematic decline in preferences for dollar assets. Instead, it is explained by a small group of countries, both due to monetary policies executed vis-à-vis euros and due to a small group of large foreign exchange reserve balance countries. Regression analysis shows that relative interest rates of reserve currencies and nontraditional currencies can tilt ...
Working Paper
The economic effects of a potential armed conflict over Taiwan
This article examines the likely economic effects of a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan for the U.S. and the world by considering historical precedents. Such a conflict would likely produce a flight-to-safety in the asset market, huge disruptions in international trade, banking problems, and would greatly exacerbate existing fiscal pressures. The authorities of the People’s Republic of China would probably try to sell U.S. and other western securities prior to a conflict to avoid sanctions on those assets. Such sales would be temporarily disruptive but would likely have only marginal ...
Report
International capital flow pressures
This paper presents a new measure of capital flow pressures in the form of a recast exchange market pressure index. The measure captures pressures that materialize in actual international capital flows as well as pressures that result in exchange rate adjustments. The formulation is theory-based, relying on balance of payments equilibrium conditions and international asset portfolio considerations. Based on the modified exchange market pressure index, the paper also proposes a global risk response index, which reflects the country-specific sensitivity of capital flow pressures to measures of ...
Working Paper
Geopolitics and the U.S. Dollar's Future as a Reserve Currency
I survey the role of geopolitics and sanctions risk in shaping the U.S. dollar's status as the primary currency used for international reserves. Without changes in the economic incentives for holding FX reserves in U.S. dollar assets, an increased threat of sanctions is unlikely to drastically reduce the dollar share of FX reserves. Currently, around three-quarters of foreign government holdings of safe U.S. assets are by countries with some military tie to the U.S. Even a reduced reliance on the U.S. dollar for trade invoicing and debt denomination by a large bloc of countries less ...
Working Paper
Foreign Exchange Reserves as a Tool for Capital Account Management
Many recent theoretical papers have argued that countries can insulate themselves from volatile world capital flows by using a variable tax on foreign capital as an instrument of monetary policy. But at the same time many empirical papers have argued that only rarely do we observe these cyclical capital taxes used in practice. In this paper we construct a small open economy model where the central bank can engage in sterilized foreign exchange intervention. When private agents can freely buy and sell foreign bonds, sterilized foreign exchange intervention has no effect. But we analytically ...