A Plan B for global finance

Dani Rodrik

Mar 12th 2009, The Economist

One problem with the global [financial regulation] strategy is that it presumes we can get leading countries to surrender significant sovereignty to international agencies. It is hard to imagine that America’s Congress would ever sign off on the kind of intrusive international oversight of domestic lending practices that might have prevented the subprime-mortgage meltdown, let alone avert future crises. Nor is it likely that the IMF will be allowed to turn itself into a true global lender of last resort. The far more likely outcome is that the mismatch between the reach of markets and the scope of governance will prevail, leaving global finance as unsafe as ever. That certainly was the outcome the last time we tried an international college of regulators, in the ill-fated case of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Read Article...