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“Ideas towards a new international financial architecture?”Edited by Oscar Ugarteche, Alicia Puyana and Maria Alejandra Madi

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Introduction

The existing international financial architecture, left over institutions from the Bretton Woods period, proved useless to prevent or warn against the 2007-2008 crisis, or even less, solve it. Only when a new presidential grouping (G20) meeting was called for in London in March 2009, the issues of how to coordinate countercyclical policies and inject resources into the economies were discussed. At that time, a UN high level Commission was created to propose reforms to the international financial architecture. The results of what became known as the Stiglitz Commission came to light in April 2010; the Commission’s recommendations were, however, shunned by some large UN member countries due to their rejection of the principle of global solutions for global problems. Indeed, some European countries and the US still insist on national solutions, that is on the use of local regulatory agencies in the international financial field.

Eight years have elapsed since the crisis emerged in 2007. There are no negative impact on the real sector as well as the financial sector is still being felt by leading financial institutions or Central Bank’s authorities. The major financial problems are dealt with at a national level in spite of being a global problem. Since 2010, the SEC has levied large fines against TBTF banks’ wrongdoings according to the definition of LIBOR, the commodity markets, the exchange markets and the fraudulent sale of collateralized debt obligations with credit risk approval from the three large American credit rating agencies; European regulators have done some of the same. Simultaneously, vulture funds attacked Argentina and made evident a nonsense of having the last creditor obtaining a better payment terms than the first one, breaking the usual understanding of the pari passu principle while a New York judge held the country hostage to his decisions. Finally all the G7 economies have come to reflect over 100% public debt on GDP ratios with only one approach to resolving this problem: austerity affecting economic growth, the price levels, and employment. As a consequence, debt indexes have increased sharply, depressing economic activity and prices.

From this background emerges the need for a new international financial architecture.

The papers

World Currencies for Sustainability

Chen, van der Beek, Cloud, Jin, Borrego

The 2007-9 global financial crisis, the post-2009 Eurozone debt crisis, and growing inequality are reasons to critique the world financial system. More disconcerting are scientific findings that civilisation’s impacts on the environment are approaching ‘planetary boundaries’ (Steffen et al., 2015) …
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