Reforming the global financial architecture

At SASE's Annual Meeting 2010 in Philadelphia, the conference organizers convened a panel to discuss the reform of the Global Financial Architecture in the light of the ongoing financial crisis. Subsequent to the panel and the discussion, the presenters and the Chair of the Panel wrote up their comments in the form of short essays which are collected together in this forum. The first two contributions by Helleiner and Seabrooke address directly problems with the efforts at reform. Helleiner draws attention to the need for macro-prudential regulation and for tackling global imbalances through developing the International Monetary Fund system of Special Drawing Rights. Seabrooke focuses on the difficulties faced in learning from the crisis and developing innovative ways of dealing with problems in the financial architecture when there are high levels of transparency to markets, effectively disallowing the sorts of confidential debates and discussions necessary for learning. As a result he identifies what he describes as a 'learning impasse' in regulatory reform. The third contribution by Erturk et al. attempts to characterize the forces which generated the crisis in order to suggest a different direction of reform from that currently being undertaken; the final contribution by Morgan also suggests that the current direction of reform is based on assumptions about the nature of finance and regulation that misdiagnose the global nature of the crisis and the capacities for international regulation and underestimate the role to be played by national governments. © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. All rights reserved.