On VoxEU, Stefan Avdjiev, Robert McCauley, and Hyun Song Shin discuss how a focus on net capital flows between countries can mislead policy analysts if they neglect heterogeneity between sectors in a country and/or non-congruence of economic and currency area that is, if they assume the “triple coincidence” between economic area, decision-making unit, and currency area. The triple coincidence misleads because it obscures gross flows, … in that it gives insufficient weight to international...
Read More »Covered Interest Parity and the Risk-Taking Channel
In a speech, Hyun Song Shin points out that CIP increasingly fails to hold: the Dollar interest rate implied by FX swaps vis-a-vis the Euro, Yen, Pound or Swiss Franc is “too high.” Moreover, the deviation is negatively correlated with the Dollar’s spot exchange rate: When the Dollar appreciates, the deviation from CIP widens. Shin argues that bank behavior explains the deviation: … the US dollar is used widely throughout the global banking system, even when neither the lender nor the...
Read More »