The period since the Second World war has been an eventful and often disturbing one in the international monetary field. Economic theories have been propounded and modified both to explain these events and to influence future choices made by economic actors.
This history of international monetary relations shows both how theoretical development affected private developments, and how the theories themselves have been judged - and often discarded - on the basis of their perceived accordance with actuality. Exchange rate movements in particular are examined in the light of the absence of...

This book provides an alternative view of the workings of foreign exchange markets.

The authors' modeling approach is based on the idea that agents use simple forecasting rules and switch to those rules that have been shown to be the most profitable in the past. This selection mechanism is based on trial and error and is probably the best possible strategy in an uncertain world, the authors contend. It creates a rich dynamic in the foreign exchange markets and can generate bubbles and crashes.

Sensitivity to initial conditions is a pervasive force in De Grauwe and...

The creation of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the introduction of the euro is a historical event for the EU countries. The debates on the desirability of the EMU provoked a vast economic literature dealing with the theory of the optimum currency area, costs and benefits of the EMU, symmetric vs. asymmetric shocks, alternative mechanisms of adjustment in a monetary union and so forth. Until recently, for the Central European candidate countries for a full membership in the EU, these issues seemed to be too far away, as they concentrated on devising their own monetary and...