LE SMI entre ses difficultés et les pistes de réforme

Dans la perspective de créer et d’augmenter les richesses des nations, l’économie mondiale a connu un essor considérable grâce à la perpétuelle évolution du cadre des relations économiques et monétaires. Cependant, le financement de toutes les activités économiques, dépendantes principalement de la stabilité du système monétaire mondial, s’avère être compliquée. Depuis plusieurs décennies, un nombre important de travaux et d’approches s'intéressant au SMI cherchent à identifier les raisons des nombreuses crises financières qui ont ébranlé les économies du monde en pointant du doigt les défaillances du système monétaire et en relançant à chaque fois le débat sur sa réforme. Certains travaux évoquent l’existence des Global Imbalances comme une explication possible de la formation d'instabilités, en faisant référence aux niveaux record des déséquilibres en compte courant sur le plan international qui ont cours depuis les années quatre-vingt-dix et jusqu'à la crise contemporaine. En effet, la crise de 2008 a eu un impact direct sur le SMI et a mis en lumière un certain nombre de vulnérabilités passées jusque-là inaperçues. Néanmoins, il n’est pas question d’expliquer l’impact des crises sur le SMI mais à montrer, plutôt, que l'architecture du SMI est peut-être un facteur provocateur des crises.

Asian financial development: the rise of a new financial system

Today, the global financial system is inefficient in bridging the gap between the developed and developing countries. The dynamically developing countries, such as Asian states, are not satisfied with modern international financial institutions and are actively involved in regional integration, creating new international financial institutions. The newly formed financial institutions contribute to the formation of a different system of financial relations in Asia, which, in turn, is being transformed into the Asian financial system. These trends cannot avoid the impact of the global imbalances. The object of the article is to prove the efficiency of the Asian financial institutions in fighting global imbalances in the region. The major task of these institutions is not the substitution of the current global mechanisms, but their assistance and helping them in solving the global problems on the regional level. The major results include the proof that the developing economies in Asia are more consolidated and capable of conducting a single economic strategy in the long run and the proof of the higher efficiency of Asian financial institutions and their single geo-economic strategy in the long run; this suggests that a new Asian financial system is being built.

Credit Cycles, Fiscal Policy, and Global Imbalances

We study the role that changes in credit and fiscal positions play in explaining current account fluctuations. Empirically, the current account declines when credit increases, and when the fiscal balance declines. We use a two-country model with financial frictions and fiscal policy to study these facts. We estimate the model using annual data for the U.S. and “a rest of the world” aggregate that includes main advanced economies. We find that about 30 percent of U.S. current account balance fluctuations are due to domestic credit shocks, while fiscal shocks explain about 14 percent. We evaluate simple macroprudential policy rules and show that they help reduce global imbalances. By taming the financial cycle, macroprudential rules that react to domestic credit conditions or to domestic house prices would have led to a smaller and less volatile U.S. current account deficit. We also show that a countercylical fiscal policy rule that stabilizes output growth reduces the level and volatility of the U.S. current account deficit.

Explaining global imbalances: the role of central-bank intervention and the rise of sovereign wealth funds

Neoclassical economic theory views current-account imbalances as the result of (individual) decisions to save more than to invest domestically. Monetary analysis in the Keynesian tradition rejects such approaches and emphasizes that a country's net savings are the result, not the cause, of net selling of goods and services to foreigners. The latter, in turn, depends on global demand patterns and absolute advantages between countries. We complement this Keynesian approach, taking a closer look at the financial account of the balance of payments: a necessary condition for countries to net-sell goods and services to foreigners is the willingness of domestic sector(s) to accumulate net foreign assets. While previous analysis of global imbalances has partially discussed the role of central banks' reserve accumulation it has failed to incorporate the macroeconomic role of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs). We analyse eight surplus countries' external positions and find that the public sector typically purchases and manages significant amounts of foreign assets via both central banks and SWFs. This, in turn, supports current-account surpluses. We then consider the particular case of Switzerland where, contrary to other surplus countries, public-sector purchases of foreign assets had been absent for a long time, yet set in massively after 2008.