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Corporate Indebtedness: Improving Financial Stability Monitoring
U.S. nonfinancial corporate credit has been identified as an area where growth in the quantity of debt and deterioration in the quality of underwriting could be a source of concern.
Risks Abound If China Uses Debt to Stimulate Economy from Current Downturn
The Chinese economy is losing steam. As China considers how to work through its difficulties, its chances of success may depend on how it finances the debt it incurs while attempting to boost economic activity.
Asset Prices, Leverage and Portfolio Rebalancing Drive Global Capital Flows Cycle
The amount of leverage—borrowed funds relative to the value of underlying assets—increases for risky holdings during downturns, motivating their ultimate sale to achieve a more secure financial position. The opposite occurs during upswings, as risky assets gain favor.
Working Paper
Large Capital Inflows, Sectoral Allocation, and Economic Performance
This paper describes the stylized facts characterizing periods of exceptionally large capital inflows in a sample of 70 middle- and high-income countries over the last 35 years. We identify 155 episodes of large capital inflows and find that these events are typically accompanied by an economic boom and followed by a slump. Moreover, during episodes of large capital inflows capital and labor shift out of the manufacturing sector, especially if the inflows begin during a period of low international interest rates. However, accumulating reserves during the period in which capital inflows are ...
Russia Counters Sanctions’ Impact with Currency Controls, Averts Crisis (for Now)
The Russian central bank responded to unprecedented sanctions with strict capital controls that have stabilized the value of its currency—the ruble.
Commodity Financing Markets Shaken by Russian Invasion; Monitoring for U.S. Financial Stress
While volatility in commodity markets is not unusual, rapid and correlated price increases across many different types of commodities at once is much rarer.
Emerging-Market Economies Face COVID-19 and a 'Sudden Stop' in Capital Flows
A rise in global risk at a time of investor risk aversion led to a rapid flight from emerging-market assets.
Don’t Look to the 2013 Tantrum for the Effect of Tapering on Emerging Markets
Many emerging markets have improved their external balance sheets since the volatility evidenced during the "taper tantrum" of 2013 and would be much less vulnerable to Federal Reserve tapering today.
Working Paper
A Theory of the Global Financial Cycle
We develop a theory to account for changes in prices of risky and safe assets and gross and net capital flows over the global financial cycle (GFC). The multi-country model features global risk-aversion shocks and heterogeneity of investors both within and across countries. Within-country heterogeneity is needed to account for the drop in gross capital flows during a negative GFC shock (higher global risk-aversion). Cross-country heterogeneity is needed to account for the differential vulnerability of countries to a negative GFC shock. The key vulnerability is associated with leverage. In ...
Working Paper
Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America, 1950-2007
After World War II, international capital flowed into slow-growing Latin America rather than fast-growing Asia. This is surprising as, everything else equal, fast growth should imply high capital returns. This paper develops a capital flow accounting framework to quantify the role of different factor market distortions in producing these patterns. Surprisingly, we find that distortions in labor markets ? rather than domestic or international capital markets ? account for the bulk of these flows. Labor market distortions that indirectly depress investment incentives by lowering equilibrium ...