sells bonds domestically, thereby soaking up new cash that would otherwise circulate around the home economy. A central bank normally makes a small loss from its overall sterilization operations, as the interest it earns from buying foreign assets to prevent appreciation is usually less than what it has to pay out on the bonds it issues domestically to check inflation. In some cases, however, a profit can be made. In the strict textbook definition, sterilization refers only to measures aimed at keeping the domestic monetary base stable; an intervention to prevent currency appreciation that involved merely buying foreign assets without counteracting the resulting increase of the domestic money supply would not count as sterilization. A textbook sterilization would be, for example, the Federal Reserve's purchase of $1 billion in foreign assets. This would create additional liquidity in foreign hands. At the same time, the Fed would sell $1 billion of debt securities into the US market, draining the domestic economy of $1 billion. With $1 billion added abroad and $1 billion removed from the domestic economy, the net capital inflow that would have influenced the currency's exchange rate has undergone sterilization. International Monetary Fund The above definition is the one most widely used in economic literature, in the financial press, by corporate and government analysts (except when they are reporting to the IMF), and by the World Bank. In contrast, what the rest of the world calls the capital account is labelled the "financial account" by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA). In the IMF's definition, the capital account represents a small subset of what the standard definition designates the capital account, largely comprising transfers. Transfers are one-way flows, such as gifts, as opposed to commercial exchanges (i.e., buying/selling and barter). The largest type of transfer between nations is typically foreign aid, but that is mostly recorded in the current account. An exception is debt forgiveness, which in a sense is the transfer of ownership of an asset. When a country receives significant debt forgiveness, that will typically comprise the bulk of its overall IMF capital account entry for that year. The IMF's capital account does include some non-transfer flows, which are sales involving non-financial and non-produced assets—for example, natural resources like land, leases and licenses, and marketing assets such as brands—but the sums involved are typically very small, as most movement