BiblioVault - Books about Foreign exchange

Exchange Rate Theory and Practice

Edited by John F. Bilson and Richard C. Marston

University of Chicago Press, 1984

This volume grew out of a National Bureau of Economic Research conference on exchange rates held in Bellagio, Italy, in 1982. In it, the world's most respected international monetary economists discuss three significant new views on the economics of exchange rates - Rudiger Dornbusch's overshooting model, Jacob Frenkel's and Michael Mussa's asset market variants, and Pentti Kouri's current account/portfolio approach. Their papers test these views with evidence from empirical studies and analyze a number of exchange rate policies in use today, including those of the European Monetary System.

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Exchange Rates and International Macroeconomics

Edited by Jacob A. Frenkel

University of Chicago Press, 1983

This volume, presenting some of the finest new research on exchange rates and international macroeconomics, contains papers and critical commentary by thirty-two leading economists. Taken together, these papers provide sound evidence about the effects of real and monetary factors on exchange rates and extend the analyses of exchange rates and international macroeconomics by outlining the kinds of behavior and institutional arrangements that can be incorporated into such analyses.

Both empirical and theoretical research are represented, and the contributors analyze such issues as the performance of various models of exchange rate determination, the role of risk and speculation in the forward market for foreign exchange, the rational expectations hypothesis in such markets, the performance of monetary policy in ten industrial countries, the role that labor market contracts play in exchange rate policies, the effect of he oil shocks on the evolution of exchange rates, and the output cost of bringing down inflation in the open economy.

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Financial Policies and the World Capital Market

The Problem of Latin American Countries

Edited by Pedro Aspe Armella, Rudiger Dornbusch, and Maurice Obstfeld

University of Chicago Press, 1983

The essays brought together in this volume share a common objective: To bring a unifying methodological approach to the analysis of financial problems in developing, open economies. While the primary focus is on contemporary Latin America, the methods employed and the lessons learned are of wider applicability. The papers address the financial integration issue from three different perspectives. In some cases, a country study is the vehicle for an econometric investigation of a particular external linkage. In other cases, an individual country's experience suggests an economic model in which the stylized facts may be analyzed and developed. A third direction is unabashedly theoretical and formulates more general principles which are broadly applicable rather than country-specific.

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International Financial Markets

The Challenge of Globalization

Edited by Leonardo Auernheimer

University of Chicago Press, 2003

As the globalization of financial markets continues, we urgently need to understand the crises that have plagued these markets and the policies best suited to preventing such crises in the future. In this book, a prominent group of economists and policymakers blend conceptual analysis and policy discussion in seven well-integrated papers, analyzing the nature of capital flows, alternative exchange-rate regimes, and the roles of international financial institutions.

After a guided tour by the editor and a historical exploration, some of the world's leading theorists and policy analysts examine the benefits and pitfalls of capital movements and controls. In the second portion, papers examine the recent experiences of Argentina and Mexico, with Charles Calomiris—whose proposals for a new world financial architecture have elicited wide attention—contributing a response. The volume concludes with a roundtable discussion of the report of the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission, in which the chair of the commission, Allan H. Meltzer, both comments on the report and responds to questions about it.

The material presented here will become a standard reference for analysts, policymakers, and the interested general public.

Contributors:
Leonardo Auernheimer, Matthew Bishop, Michael D. Bordo, Charles Calomiris, Guillermo A. Calvo, Augustin Carstens, Michael P. Dooley, Pablo E. Guidotti, T. Britton Harris, John P. Lipsky, Guillermo Ortiz Martinez, Allan H. Meltzer, Andrew Powell, Rene Stulz, Carl E. Walsh

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The Money Doctors from Japan

Finance, Imperialism, and the Building of the Yen Bloc, 1895–1937

Michael Schiltz

Harvard University Press, 2012

Money and finance have been among the most potent tools of colonial power. This study investigates the Japanese experiment with financial imperialism—or “yen diplomacy”—at several key moments between the acquisition of Taiwan in 1895 and the outbreak of the Sino–Japanese War in 1937. Through authoritarian monetary reforms and lending schemes, government officials and financial middlemen served as “money doctors” who steered capital and expertise to Japanese official and semi-official colonies in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Manchuria.

Michael Schiltz points to the paradox of acute capital shortages within the Japan’s domestic economy and aggressive capital exports to its colonial possessions as the inevitable but ultimately disastrous outcome of the Japanese government’s goal to exercise macroeconomic control over greater East Asia and establish a self-sufficient “yen bloc.” Through their efforts to implement their policies and contribute to the expansion of the Japanese empire, the “money doctors” brought to the colonies a series of banking institutions and a corollary capitalist ethos, which would all have a formidable impact on the development of the receiving countries, eventually affecting their geopolitical position in the postcolonial world.

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Odd Man Out

Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas

Carol M. Armstrong

University of Chicago Press, 1991

In Odd Man Out, Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as odd man out within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; he was a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; he painted modern life yet was no modernist; he belonged to the impressionist group yet was no impressionist. She confronts these and other contradictions by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work.

By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted. Each of these groups of images is matched to different interpretive moves, each highlighting distinct themes: economics and vocation; narrative and semiotics; gender and corporeality; and the author and self. Armstrong's provocative analysis celebrates the tantalizing qualities of the artist's elusive career: the pluralism of his work, its conflation of positivistic and negational tactics, the modern and the traditional, the abstract and the representational.

"A lucid and searching study. . . . Armstrong has produced one of the most elegant and persuasive examples of the historian's use of 19th-century art criticism. In the process, she has achieved a reading of the artist which makes a difference to the way we understand the difference of Degas himself."—Neil McWilliam, Times Higher Education Supplement

"This is a brilliant, original, and beautifully articulated study. Carol Armstrong's scholarship is impressive in its richness, ambition, and sophistication: Degas's works have rarely been given such detailed, penetrating, and suggestive readings as those offered in this book."—Linda Nochlin, Yale University

"With brilliant insight and incisive analytical intelligence, Carol Armstrong introduces new ways to conceptualize the structural ambiguities of Degas's work. Her subtle and probing readings clarify the fundamental contrariness of Degas's images—their disturbing negativity, their anti-modern modernism. Odd Man Out catapults the criticism of Degas from the hinterlands of traditional art history to the foreground of contemporary critical theory in both literature and the visual arts."—Charles Bernheimer, University of Pennsylvania

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Sovereign Funds

How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions

Zongyuan Zoe Liu

Harvard University Press, 2023

“A fascinating insight into the evolution of China’s financial policy and its strategic investments using leveraged foreign exchange reserves.” —Diane Coyle, Enlightened Economist 

“[Liu] shows that Chinese sovereign funds are so different from better-known sovereign wealth funds, such as those of the governments of Abu Dhabi and Norway, that she prefers to call them ‘sovereign leveraged funds’...These various exotic workarounds, which Liu skillfully traces, produce ‘shadow reserves.’” —Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs  

“Follow the money, find the politics...Liu shows how China pioneered a whole new class of sovereign wealth funds.” —Times of India 

One of the keys to China’s global rise has been its strategy of deploying sovereign wealth on behalf of state power. Since President Xi Jinping took office in 2013, China has doubled down on financial statecraft, making shrewd investments with the money it has made by leveraging its foreign exchange reserves. Sovereign Funds tells the story of how the Communist Party of China (CPC) became a global financier of surpassing ambition. 

Zongyuan Zoe Liu offers a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the evolution of China’s sovereign funds, including the China Investment Corporation, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, and Central Huijin Investment, showing how these institutions have become mechanisms not only for transforming low-reward foreign exchange reserves into investment capital but also for power projection. Sovereign funds are essential drivers of the national interest, shaping global markets, advancing the historic Belt and Road Initiative, and funneling state assets into strategic industries such as semiconductors, fintech, and artificial intelligence. Liu uncovers how the CPC is a leader in both foreign exchange reserves investment and economic statecraft, using state capital to encourage domestic economic activity and create spheres of influence worldwide.

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Strained Relations

US Foreign-Exchange Operations and Monetary Policy in the Twentieth Century

Michael D. Bordo, Owen F. Humpage, and Anna J. Schwartz

University of Chicago Press, 2015

During the twentieth century, foreign-exchange intervention was sometimes used in an attempt to solve the fundamental trilemma of international finance, which holds that countries cannot simultaneously pursue independent monetary policies, stabilize their exchange rates, and benefit from free cross-border financial flows. Drawing on a trove of previously confidential data, Strained Relations reveals the evolution of US policy regarding currency market intervention, and its interaction with monetary policy. The authors consider how foreign-exchange intervention was affected by changing economic and institutional circumstances—most notably the abandonment of the international gold standard—and how political and bureaucratic factors affected this aspect of public policy.

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