Currencies of External Balance Sheets

Cian Allen, Deepali Gautam and Luciana Juvenal

No 2023/237, IMF Working Papers from International Monetary Fund

Abstract: This paper assembles a comprehensive dataset of the currency composition of countries’ external balance sheets for 50 economies over the period 1990–2020. We document the following findings: (i) the US dollar and the euro still dominate global external balance sheets; (ii) there were striking changes in the currency composition across countries since the 1990s, with many emerging markets having moved from short to long positions in foreign currency, thus moving away from the so-called “original sin”; (iii) financial and tradeweighted exchange rates are weakly correlated, suggesting the commonly used trade indices do not adequately reflect the wealth effects of currency movements, and (iv) the large wealth transfers across countries during COVID-19 and the global financial crises increased global imbalances in the former, and reduced them in the latter.

Keywords: currency composition; international investment position; foreign currency exposure; wealth effect; currency movement; currency exposure; debt liability; currency mismatch risk; pound sterling; Currencies; Exchange rates; Global financial crisis of 2008-2009; Financial statements; Global (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49
Date: 2023-11-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-ifn, nep-mon and nep-opm
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