Authors:

  • Edwin Truman

Excerpt

Noevember 2021, Opinion: "Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, and Kris James Mitchener present a valuable, detailed account of the evolution of public debt instruments and institutions that many either don’t understand or take for granted. They distinguish between the debt of central and sub-national governments, debt sold in the domestic and foreign markets, and debt denominated in domestic and foreign currency. The boundaries of this changing landscape are fuzzy. The authors emphasize the evolution of government borrowing to finance a growing list of national objectives, starting with wars. Globalization of the sovereign allowed governments to expand their access to longer-term finance in the late nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. The focus shifted to bank loans in the 1970s and 1980s before reverting to the bond model in the early 1990s."

MRCBG Senior Fellow - Ted Truman