Members of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the staff and management of the Fund should be congratulated for taking up the complex and vexed topic of international capital flows and reaching consensus on an “institutional view” to help guide their discussions and advice. They have taken an important step toward an improved understanding of and dialogue about the policy issues. For some time, I have urged that these issues be addressed, and I am gratified with the results.

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A long-awaited overview paper [pdf] on sovereign debt restructuring from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is here, the first since 2005. And it does not revive the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM) proposal, which died in 2003 at the hands of the United States and the big emerging markets. As the new paper explains politely, [...]

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Cyprus is small even by peripheral euro area standards. With a GDP in 2012 of less than €18 billion, the country is only about one-tenth the size of Ireland, Portugal, or Greece. In the context of the euro area’s new €500 billion European Stability Mechanism, its financial problems look like a rounding error. Yet as [...]

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In the Financial Times today (January 14), I argue that multilateral trade as we know it could soon become history. In the past, we have seen regional trade agreements between large and small countries. Now for the first time, we are seeing the prospects of regional trade agreements between the major trading nations: the United [...]

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Can we have the euro area crisis and its elevated bond yields back, please? In the absence of acute market pressure, euro area leaders like Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain are sitting on their hands rather than opting for stability and applying for aid from the European Stability Mechanism and European Central Bank (ESM/ECB). [...]

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The October World Economic Outlook of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), issued semi-annually, contains an ambitious chapter 3, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: 100 Years of Dealing with Public Debt Overhangs.” It is an empirical study of developed countries that have had public debt of more than 100 percent of GDP in the [...]

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Unexpectedly, Slovenia is going through a financial crisis despite a record of sound behavior on many fronts. Its government bond yields surged above 7 percent in August, and the country is having trouble maintaining access to international financial markets. The question today is whether Slovenia will join the roster of countries needing a bailout program [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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