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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.
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 [...]
Note: This essay was also posted on Mr. Johnson’s blog Baseline Scenario. Two diametrically opposed views of Wall Street and the dangers posed by global megabanks came more clearly into focus last week. On the one hand, William B. Harrison, Jr.—former chairman of JP Morgan Chase—argued in the New York Times that today’s massive banks [...]
The announcement on August 15 that International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde will visit Cairo on August 22 has created considerable speculation that an IMF program will be implemented soon. While it could be merely a courtesy visit—Lagarde was after all invited by the government of Egypt and could hardly refuse without sending [...]
Adam S. Posen, who will take over as president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in January, has delivered a few provocative parting calls to action as he exits his post as an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). His comments favoring more aggressive action by the central bank [...]
Note: This is an excerpt of the forthcoming PIIE Policy Brief Understanding the Trans-Pacific Partnership by Jeffrey J. Schott, Barbara Kotschwar, and Julia Muir. The text of this post was also the basis for the author’s remarks at The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Future of International Trade event (the webcast of which can be found [...]
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 [...]
In Lord Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi, an underling of the British Empire heatedly warns his supercilious boss that Mahatma Gandhi’s impending protest march to the sea poses a far greater threat than the Raj realizes: “Salt, sir, is a symbol.” This elicits the memorable sneering put-down from the boss (played by Sir John Gielgud): “Don’t [...]