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Seminar

After the Allocation: What Role for the Special Drawing Rights System?

FBF seminar series

Add to calendar 2021-10-18 14:00 2021-10-18 15:30 Europe/Rome After the Allocation: What Role for the Special Drawing Rights System? Seminar Room 3 Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD
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Scheduled dates

Oct 18 2021

14:00 - 15:30 CEST

Seminar Room 3, Badia Fiesolana

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Tobias Pforr presents the potential of the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) system to address debt-related problems in global finance.
In August 2021, the IMF made a new SDR allocation to help ease pandemic-induced financial strains in the Global South. In this seminar, Tobias Pforr will assess the potential of the SDR system to address debt-related problems in global finance. He has extensively analyzed the SDR system as a web of interlocking balance sheets whose members can use SDR holdings—the system's tradable assets—for conversion into usable currency as a perpetual low-interest loan or to make payments to each other. Using original IMF data, the speaker will outline how the system has been practically used since 1990. Though widely perceived as a solution in search of a problem in the post-Bretton Woods era, one of the main findings is that the SDR system provides three mechanisms through which IMF members borrow and lend usable currency to each other, with different strings attached: first, transactions by agreement; second, the IMF's core lending facilities for which the SDR system offers additional resources; and third, IMF-sponsored Trusts which seek to harness the SDR system for development purposes and are the basis for the current idea of 'voluntary channeling'. Overall, given the SDR system's idiosyncratic accounting rules, the new allocation can improve states' liquidity conditions, albeit less than commonly claimed, but it cannot address solvency issue.

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