Macroeconomic Imbalances in the United States and their Impact on the International Financial System

2010 ◽  
pp. 127-141
Author(s):  
Julia S. Loe
2019 ◽  
pp. 185-193
Author(s):  
Jerome Roos

This chapter considers why the International Monetary Fund (IMF) did it not prevent Argentina's record default of 2001. It suggests that the IMF was both unable and unwilling to stop it. While the second enforcement mechanism of conditional IMF lending was initially fully operative, helping to enforce Argentina's compliance in the first years of the crisis, the outcome of the megaswap greatly reduced the risk of an Argentine default to the international financial system. Combined with mounting domestic opposition in the United States to further international bailout loans, this greatly weakened the IMF's capacity to impose fiscal discipline on Argentina, eventually leading the Fund to pull the plug on its own bailout program, causing the second enforcement mechanism to break down altogether. The chapter recounts the process through which this breakdown occurred.


2015 ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
O. Butorina

The increased economic power of the United States and their enormous golden reserves are the main reasons used by economists to explain why the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 put the dollar in the centre of a new international financial system. However, it is not clear if these conditions were sufficient for the introduction of a gold (de facto dollar) standard and excluded any other type of international financial order. The study of historical data reveals an effective diplomatic maneuver conducted by the U.S. administration with an aim to prevent a global transit to fiat money, to keep the importance of gold and to build a strictly hierarchical international financial system.


2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 127-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C Sharman

The last few years have seen an international campaign to ensure that the world's financial and banking systems are “transparent,” meaning that every actor and transaction within the system can be traced to a discrete, identifiable individual. I present an audit study of compliance with the prohibitions on anonymous shell companies. In particular, I describe my attempts to found anonymous corporate vehicles without proof of identity and then to establish corporate bank accounts for these vehicles. (Transactions processed through the corporate account of such a “shell company” become effectively untraceable—and thus very useful for those looking to hide criminal profits, pay or receive bribes, finance terrorists, or escape tax obligations.) I solicited offers of anonymous corporate vehicles from 54 different corporate service providers in 22 different countries, and collated the responses to determine whether the existing legal and regulatory prohibitions on anonymous corporate vehicles actually work in practice. To foreshadow the results, it seems that small island offshore centers may have standards for corporate transparency and disclosure that are higher than major OECD economies like the United States and the United Kingdom.


Author(s):  
Yilmaz Akyüz

After recurrent crises with severe consequences in the 1990s and early 2000s EDEs have become even more closely integrated into what is now widely recognized as an inherently unstable international financial system. This chapter discusses the factors accelerating global financial integration of EDEs, including monetary policies in major advanced economies, notably the United States. It examines capital inflows and outflows, external balance sheets, the size and composition of gross external assets and liabilities, distinguishing between equity and debt, private and public sectors, local currency and foreign currency debt, bond issues and bank loans, and cross-border and local lending by international banks. It provides data and information on the currency composition of external debt, and non-resident participation in domestic financial markets of emerging economies. These are used to identify the changes in the depth and pattern of integration of emerging economies into the international financial system since the early 1990s.


Author(s):  
Мехти Галиб Мехтиев ◽  
Mekhti Galib Mekhtiev

The present article evaluates history of swap agreements’ application and their functioning system in the framework of intercentral bank relations (in particular by the Federal Reserve System of the United States (the Fed)). Swap includes two transactions: the first is a currency exchange on the spot market rate and the second is a future transaction on the rate defined in advance. This mechanism proved its efficiency within its application through history. In 1970s, during a radical transformation period of an entire global currency architecture caused by collapse of Bretton Woods’s system the Fed applied swap agreements to promote stability on financial markets and particularly on currency markets. Later during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 these agreements again have become rescue measures for the global financial system, as the financial shock caused liquidity deficit for financial institutions and thus cut dramatically credit supply. And finally nowadays the global financial system is badly in need of swap agreements. The swaps’ force of attraction is that firstly it differs from crediting as the latter is one way currency extension, while swap agreement is the exchange of equivalent values. And secondly it fixes the rate of the future currency transaction what lightens both monetary regulation within national jurisdiction and regulation on the level of public international law.


2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Ashman

AbstractThe current global economic crisis is historically unprecedented in that it began when poor groups in the United States defaulted on their mortgage-payments and spread fear of 'toxic debt' through an internationalised financial system, bringing the banking system close to collapse and highlighting the very individualised nature of contemporary financial relations. The symposium explores contemporary finance and banking practices in the context of Marxist political economy seeking to develop the notion of financialisation and arguing that banks' increasing reliance on individual households as a source of profits amounts to a form of financial expropriation or additional profit generated in the sphere of circulation.


2019 ◽  
pp. 152-170
Author(s):  
Hyun Song Shin

Mortgage securitisations rose rapidly in the early 2000s through the private label securitisation vehicles that packaged subprime mortgages. The size of the asset-backed securities sector in the United States traces well the overall leverage of the financial system in the run-up to the Great Financial Crisis.


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