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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.
In response to several inquiries1, I offer a few more comments on Europe in 2013, in particular why I do not view a delay in euro area fiscal integration as a disaster, why the United Kingdom will not leave the European Union and what I view as the major downside risk in 2013. (Hint: It [...]
Mary Schapiro, the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has announced that she will step down from her position next month after four years in office. President Barack Obama appointed one of the four other SEC Commissioners, Elisse Walter, to replace her until a more permanent successor is chosen next year. The [...]
Note: This post is based on the author’s paper “Asia’s Changing Position in Global Financial Reform” presented at the joint conference “Asian Capital Market Development and Integration: Challenges and Opportunities” co-organized by the Asian Development Bank, Korea Capital Markets Institute, and the Peterson Institute, in Seoul on October 24, 2012. Before 2007–08, most global financial [...]
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 [...]
In their summit statement [pdf] of June 29, 2012, the heads of state and government of the euro area issued a declaration widely interpreted by investors as the founding act of a European banking union, about which European policymakers have been talking increasingly vocally in the past two months or so. Their commitment remains little [...]
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 [...]
As economic and financial pressures rise in the euro area, the commentary often suggests that an economic collapse and an outgrowth of extremist political forces reminiscent of the 1930s are upon us. These alarmist analogies come from two groups of people. Some are global hedge fund specialists whose “tail-end event risk franchises” require predictions of [...]
Systemic fragility in the European banking sector predates the Greek fiscal crisis. It was revealed by the subprime/Lehman shock of 2007–08, and has never been properly addressed since then in spite of successive stress tests. In recent weeks, several senior policymakers have become more explicit on the need for a banking union—in other words, a [...]
On the face of it, the financial crisis of 2007-08 has helped rebalance the governance of global financial authorities, partially correcting the prior underrepresentation of emerging economies and of Asia in particular. From November 2008 to April 2009, when the G-7/G-8 was superseded by the G-20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) was empowered and enlarged [...]
The European Union’s finance ministers are furiously debating a piece of legislation known as CRD4/CRR (the acronyms stand for the fourth Capital Requirements Directive and the Capital Requirements Regulation). The measure is intended to implement the Basel III accord on bank capital, leverage, liquidity and risk management, which was adopted at the global level by [...]