Instead, I will focus on three topics: international capital markets, the provision of international liquidity and the newly emerging question of an international store of value. These are issues of joint and common interest for all countries, whether emerging or developed, and whether their current account is in surplus or deficit. Getting to a common understanding on those matters would help in making progress on other, more contentious questions. Opinions expressed are solely mine and do not represent the views of Banque de France or the Eurosystem. What is an international monetary system? According to an apt definition, an international monetary system consists of (i) exchange rate arrangements; (ii) capital flows; and (iii) a collection of institutions, rules, and conventions that govern its operation (Carney, 2009). Presumably, the purpose of such “institutions, rules, and conventions” is to ensure the sustainability and mutual consistency between national policies. There may be also an implicit objective of “fairness” in the sense that, when international imbalances need to be corrected, the burden of adjustment should be equitably shared. Accordingly, an international monetary system should be based on explicit or implicit “rules of the games” to which national economic policies would be subordinated. This is an ambitious approach and it may seem too normative to some. But it has a long history:   the gold standard, from which the phrase “rules of the games” originated, was based on mechanisms which imposed automatic and symmetric adjustments in balance of payments, according to specie flows.
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