Tag Archives: reserves

Gulfs in our Energy Security, and the Louisiana Oil Blowout

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In the wake of the April oil well blowout off the coast of Louisiana, policy-makers are rethinking the issue of off-shore drilling.    Clearly the last decade’s neglect of safety rules by federal regulators needs to come to an end.   But what larger implications should we draw for domestic oil drilling? 

The tension has long been between those who give primacy to the environment, on the one hand, and those who give primacy to business on the other.    Probably some of the first group oppose all oil drilling and some of the latter support all oil drilling (even when the government unconscionably offers oil leases on federal lands at below-market rates, as it often has historically).    As so often, the right answer lies in between. read more

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The Dollar Share in Central Banks’ FX Reserves Resumes its Decline

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          Numbers newly reported from the IMF’s COFER data base show that in the most recent quarter, the spring of 2009, the share of central banks’ foreign exchange reserve holdings that they allocate to dollars resumed its downward trend.   The dollar share has been gradually sliding since the beginning of the decade – perhaps because of the birth of a possible rival, the euro, in 1999, or perhaps because of the long-term path of tremendous fiscal and monetary expansion on which the United States embarked in 2001.   
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