A Concise History of Exchange Rate Regimes in Latin America

This paper analyzes the experience of the major Latin American countries including Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru and others in the post-World-War period, up to the crisis caused by the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble. The authors provide a detailed historical analysis that takes into account the most important economic events that helped determine exchange rate policy, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the various exchange rate regimes, and their impact on outcomes including economic growth and inflation.capital controls, capital flows

Currency Wars: What do effective exchange rates tell us?

In November, South Korea joined the ranks of countries striving to limit the upwards pressure on their currency when two lawmakers submitted a parliamentary proposal to impose various taxes on foreign capital inflows and outflows. If any of these measures pushes through, South Korea would become the first (traditionally financially liberalised) OECD country to reinstate capital controls. This brings the list of countries intervening directly, indirectly or considering intervention to more than 23. This is an unwelcome and disturbing, but hardly surprising, development: as policy rates in the US are at near-zero levels and monetary policy is geared towards managing the yield curve in order to meet domestic objectives, emerging countries throughout the world are scrambling to protect themselves from the negative spillovers in the form of massive capital inflows...

Exchange rates and fundamentals

Standard economic models hold that exchange rates are influenced by fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation rates and interest rates. Nonetheless, it has been well documented that such variables little help predict changes in floating exchange rates Š that is, exchange rates follow a random walk. We show that the data do exhibit a related link suggested by standard models - that the exchange rate helps predict fundamentals. We also show analytically that in a rational expectations present value model, an asset price manifests near random walk behavior if fundamentals are I(1) and the factor for discounting future fundamentals is near one. We suggest that this may apply to exchange rates.