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China’s growth over the past 30 years has been remarkable. In part, that reflects a strategy pursued by many emerging market economies in the past with a focus on expanding exports. More recently, China’s current account surplus has shrunk, reflecting the collapse in world trade during the financial crisis, and the domestic stimulus China introduced in response. This article discusses China’s previous growth pattern and asks whether the nascent rebalancing will be sustained, considering implications for the rest of the world.

This paper provides an empirical test of the scapegoat theory of exchange rates (Bacchetta and van Wincoop 2004, 2011), as an attempt to evaluate its potential for explaining the poor empirical performance of traditional exchange rate models. This theory suggests that market participants may at times attach significantly more weight to individual economic fundamentals to rationalize the pricing of currencies, which are partly driven by unobservable shocks. Using novel survey data which directly measure foreign exchange scapegoats for 12 currencies and a decade of proprietary data on order flow, we find empirical evidence that strongly supports the empirical implications of the scapegoat theory of exchange rates, with the resulting models explaining a large fraction of the variation and directional changes in exchange rates. The findings have implications for exchange rate modelling, suggesting that a more accurate understanding of exchange rates requires taking into account the role of scapegoat factors and their time-varying nature.

We estimate structurally a model of the term structure of interest rates that is consistent with no arbitrage but allows for demand pressures. The term structure in our model is determined through the interaction of risk-averse arbitrageurs and preferred-habitat investors with preferences for specific maturities. The model is estimated on US real rates during the 2000s and allows for two factors: one corresponding to the short rate and one to preferred-habitat demand. We find that the puzzling drop in long rates during 2004-05 (Greenspan conundrum) is driven by the demand factor, which in turn is correlated with purchases of long-term bonds by foreign officials. For example, foreign purchases in July 2004 appear to have lowered the 10-year rate by about 100 basis points. Foreign purchases have larger effects following periods when arbitrageurs have lost money.