Lessons from the Asian Monetary Fund for the European Monetary Fund. CEPS Policy Brief No. 208, 16 April 2010

On March 24th the members of ASEAN plus three other major Asian economies (China, Japan and Korea) began operations of a fund from which member countries can swap their national currencies for US dollars within a pre-determined limit. This so-called "Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization" or CMIM will essentially become an Asian Monetary Fund, once its institutional structure is in place. This paper draws lessons from the Asian experience for the recent debate in Europe over the feasibility and desirability of creating a European stability fund

Bogomol'nyi Solitons and Hermitian Symmetric Spaces

We apply the coadjoint orbit method to construct relativistic nonlinear sigma models (NLSM) on the target space of coadjoint orbits coupled with the Chern-Simons (CS) gauge field and study self-dual solitons. When the target space is given by Hermitian symmetric space (HSS), we find that the system admits self-dual solitons whose energy is Bogomol'nyi bounded from below by a topological charge. The Bogomol'nyi potential on the Hermitian symmetric space is obtained in the case when the maximal torus subgroup is gauged, and the self-dual equation in the $CP(N-1)$ case is explored. We also discuss the self-dual solitons in the non-compact $SU(1,1)$ case and present a detailed analysis for the rotationally symmetric solutions.Comment: 10 pages, 2 ps figures, Latex, A revised version to be published in Reports on Mathematical Physic