“For the first time since the pandemic began, there is now hope for a brighter future.” That was the assessment given by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) on December 1 following the news of progress being made with coronavirus vaccines.
Is the current cure, in the form of lockdowns, for the COVID-19 plague worse than the pernicious virus itself? This hotly debated question has vocal supporters on both sides, as the pandemic continues to attack lives and livelihoods worldwide. Many believe that preserving human health and economic health need not be at odds but can both be achieved in the short term until a permanent solution for the virus arrives.
The COVID-19 crisis has engulfed all continents, but Latin America and the Caribbean has suffered more than most, coping with the high toll of lost human life and bankrupt businesses that once thrived. Banks cannot escape the inevitable collateral damage to their balance sheets, especially when government supports end. To avoid a financial crisis and ensure a return to economic health, good policies are needed to promote financial stability and recovery.
The global economy is caught up in a vicious spiral of worsening financial conditions spawned by the pandemic. Many developing economies were lumbered with high debt loads before COVID-19, but the crisis has greatly aggravated their crippling debt situations. As millions of people teeter on the brink of extreme poverty levels, what are the three weakest gaps in the international debt architecture, and how can they best be patched up?
The Covid crisis has shown that the reform of international financial regulation in recent years has not corrected the procyclicality of the financial system. On the contrary, this problem has worsened as a result of the new accounting standards. This article explores the reasons for this and possible policy measures to address the problem, including a more rules-based approach to macroprudential policies and a rebalancing between countercyclical and structural buffers in favor of the former.
The last decade or so has seen concerns grow significantly over the long-term health of the dollar. Those concerns have only grown in urgency since the coronavirus arrived on the shores of the United States in February, triggering a nationwide shutdown of the world’s biggest economy.
Global upheavals on the scale of COVID-19 inevitably change “business as usual” permanently. Once the lockdown lifts, the reboot will begin, but how will it look? New approaches to evaluating risk and return will be needed to traverse the new financial landscape and efforts to scale up investments to reach the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals even more critical. How we approach the challenge and build sustainability into the recovery plans will be of great consequence and essential to improving resilience against future global threats.
Few countries in the world can lay claim to having more experience with sovereign defaults than Argentina. Having first failed to pay its debts back in 1827, South America’s second-largest nation has gone on to achieve the undesirable feat on a further seven occasions, with the most recent episode occurring in 2014.
Some puzzles are fun, while others are not. The sovereign-bank diabolic loop puzzle is definitely not fun for the European governments and banks victimized by it. Trapped in the loop, banks hurt sovereigns, while sovereigns return the favor by hurting banks. Is there a way to break free of this deadly embrace? New research shines a light on a possible channel to freedom that strangely enough originates in the US.
January 13 of this year marked the 10th anniversary of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, a devastating episode that levelled much of the Caribbean nation, leaving 300,000 dead and displacing a further 1.6 million (more than 10 percent of the total population).