| When the Bretton Woods system of fi xed-but-adjustable exchange rates foundered in March 1973, exchange rates apparently went their own merry way, independent of differences in infl ation rates between countries or of the current account of the balance of payments. A decisive factor was that capital movements developed to such an extent that they soon seemed totally to swamp international payments on account of trade in goods and services. Surveys conducted in April 2001 by 48 central banks and other monetary authorities put the average daily turnover in so-called traditional foreign-exchange (or forex) markets (including spot, outright forward and foreign-exchange swap transactions and adjusted for double counting) at $1200 billion, of which $387 billion was made up of spot transactions (BIS 2002, p. 5).1 Against that, the aggregate value of world exports of goods and services reached $7465 billion in 2001 (IMF 2002, p. 185), equal to the volume of foreign exchange traded in slightly more than six days. So the experience since 1973 has been characterised by a dominance of capital movements over payments on the current account (though the fi gures may give a somewhat distorted picture, as $689 billion or 59 per cent of daily turnover was between forex dealers, who shift funds among themselves in order to spread their risks). International economists were sent back to their studies to rethink exchange-rate theory. The result has been a spate of models that venture to explain the erratic behaviour of exchange rates after 1973. The variety of models is quite bewildering. |
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 | | | | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee and WiMaxThe advent of ubiquitous computing and the proliferation of portable computing devices have raised the importance of mobile and wireless networking. Recently, there has been a tremendous interest in broadband wireless access systems, including wireless local area networks (WLANs), broadband wireless access, and wireless personal area networks... |
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