Carmen Reinhart

The persistence of global imbalances

Carmen Reinhart | Wednesday 30 August 2017
The primary focus of this year’s Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which convenes the world’s leading central bankers, was not explicitly monetary policy. Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s opening remarks emphasized the...
Recovery is not resolution

Carmen Reinhart | Tuesday 1 August 2017
Earlier this year, the consensus view among economists was that the US would outstrip its advanced-economy rivals. The expected US growth spurt would be driven by the economic stimulus package described in President Donald Trump’s election...
One hundred years of indebtedness

Carmen Reinhart | Friday 30 June 2017
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate novelist most famous for One Hundred Years of Solitude, was native to Colombia. Nonetheless, as a master of magical realism, Garcia Marquez would have appreciated Argentina’s recent combination of fact...
Trump’s magic budget

Carmen Reinhart | Monday 29 May 2017
US President Donald Trump’s administration has now released its budget plans for fiscal year 2018. Among the details provided in the document, entitled “America First — A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” are projections for the...
Addicted to dollars

Carmen Reinhart | Sunday 5 March 2017
Since the end of World War II, the US share in global gross domestic product (GDP) has fallen from nearly 30 percent to about 18 percent. Other advanced economies have also experienced sustained declines in their respective slices of the global...
Is the deflation cycle over?

Carmen Reinhart | Wednesday 1 February 2017
Until the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, deflation had all but disappeared as a concern for policymakers and investors in the advanced economies, apart from Japan, which has been subject to persistent downward pressure on prices for nearly a...
Will dollar strength trigger intervention?

Carmen Reinhart | Monday 2 January 2017
Only a small group of central banks refrain from intervening in the foreign exchange market to stabilize their currencies’ exchange rate or coax it in the desired direction. Even when they do not intervene directly, their interest rate policies are...
Fleeing from Italy

Carmen Reinhart | Friday 25 November 2016
Italy’s referendum on Dec. 4 will give voters the opportunity to approve or reject what some have described as the country’s most extensive constitutional reforms since the abolition of the monarchy at the end of World War II. Yet it may be the fact...
Brexit’s blow to globalization

Carmen Reinhart | Thursday 30 June 2016
The United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum has shaken equity and financial markets around the world. As in prior episodes of contagious financial turmoil, the victory of the “Leave” vote sent skittish global investors toward the usual safe havens. US...
Whose QE was it, anyway?

Carmen Reinhart | Wednesday 2 March 2016
Between 1913 (when the United States Federal Reserve was founded) and the latter part of the 1980s, it would be fair to say that the Fed was the only game in town when it came to purchases of US Treasury securities by central banks. During that era...