Connecting the Dots Between Global Risks

By iMFdirect



The new chair of the IMF’s policy-setting body, the International Monetary and Financial Committee, Singapore’s Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said that the IMF will need to develop capabilities “to address risks proactively, to anticipate possible scenarios that could turn out to be ugly, and to require that countries, including especially systemically significant countries, take actions early to prevent another major crisis.”

This will require new kinds of analysis. One idea is for a new consolidated report on multilateral surveillance that would include analysis about how economic problems in one part of the world might impact or “spillover” could affect others. According to Managing Director Strauss-Kahn, “we are at Year One of the new multilateral surveillance for the Fund.”

As the meetings were wrapping up in Washington DC, the IMF’s First Deputy Managing Director talked about the outcomes of the meetings. While there are concerns about risks in the global economy, there was important progress on a “multilateral cooperative approach on the various challenges we face.” Watch his interview to hear more about what Mr. Lipsky has to say about progress by the G-20 and about the likely changes to the IMF’s multilateral surveillance.

In an interview during the Spring Meetings, Minister Tharman also spoke about in more detail about the importance of better monitoring risks and spillovers, and his views on IMF governance reforms and being the first IMFC chair from Asia.

2 Responses

  1. Three years into the crisis you are not doing the best of jobs connecting the dots.

    The bank regulators (Basel II) considered the credit ratings of the clients of the banks, when setting the capital requirements for the banks, even though that information was already being considered by the market and the banks when setting their risk-premiums and interest rates for their clients

    And as we should know sometimes what is considered in excess, can be much worse than what is not considered at all.

    Those regulations drove the banks excessively into the arms of the triple-A rated and sovereigns, where they are now drowning; and away from those job creating agents who the small businesses and entrepreneurs are… while at the same time providing the growth hormones of the “too big to fail”.

    Are these dots really that hard to connect?

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s


Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,229 other followers

%d bloggers like this: