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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
Algirdas Semeta, EU Commissioner for Taxation, recently toured Washington touting the decision by eleven of the 17 members of the euro area to adopt a common financial transactions tax (FTT). In his public remarks, Commissioner Semeta invoked the name of Nobel-prize-winning, Yale economist James Tobin, who advocated such a tax in the 1970s to discourage [...]
The formula employed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its members to help guide the distribution of the Fund’s quota subscriptions and voting power is one of the more arcane topics in international finance.1 But it is also a proxy for many large and important zero-sum issues, such as which countries are up and [...]
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has released a Pilot External Sector Report in which the organization for the first time has embraced the concept of fundamental equilibrium exchange rates (FEERs) for use in its surveillance activities. The report, issued on July 30, was an important though little-noticed step that could portend progress toward improving multilateral [...]
European leaders met on June 28–29 for the 19th time since the euro area debt crisis broke in early 2010. Once again, the leaders took decisions to do what is necessary to prevent a full-scale collapse of the euro area economy and financial system. Only time will tell whether they have put in motion what [...]
For more than two years, European leaders have dithered. They have failed to address decisively the escalating euro-area sovereign debt crises. In the process, the European economy has been damaged and the future of the entire European integration project, which began more than 60 years ago, has been called into question. Moreover, the failure of [...]
I was privileged to know Mike Mussa for almost 25 years. We met when he joined the Council of Economic Advisers in the mid-1980s. I first began to encounter him regularly up close and personal during the early 1990s when, as the economic counselor of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), he participated in meetings of [...]
On December 8, at its next governing council meeting, the European Central Bank (ECB) should reduce its interest rates by one percentage point to 25 basis points. Anything less would amount to dereliction of the ECB’s duty to the euro area economy. The euro area faces the deepest economic and financial crisis since the exchange [...]
In the blinding fog of the continuing European sovereign debt crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its latest triennial surveillance review (TSR) on October 31. The IMF proposes to take important further steps forward in response to criticisms that its past surveillance practices were lax and incomplete. It is now up to the management, [...]
Charles A. E. Goodhart has recently sketched out a well-grounded and well-argued diagnosis of what the European integration project needs if it is to be sustained and moved forward after the current crisis eventually ends. He puts forward some sensible, if incomplete, suggestions. He provided this reader with a great deal of stimulating intellectual food [...]
The euro area faces an existential crisis. After almost two years of drama, European sovereign debt problems and associated threats to the stability of European financial institutions continue to build. The euro and the European integration project confront “catastrophic risks,” in the words of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and time is running out. A [...]