Turbulent Waters: Cross-Border Finance and International Governance advocates faster progress in reforming the international financial system. Its most important theme is the need for national governments and international organizations to upgrade their collective efforts at crisis prevention and prosperity management. The core of such efforts is the supranational surveillance of cross-border “traffic regulations” and the cooperative monitoring of nations’ macroeconomic, exchange rate, and balance-of-payments policies. Concurrently, governments should streamline and strengthen the intermediation of intergovernmental lending for the liability financing of payments deficits through the International Monetary Fund. This essay gives detailed analysis supporting these conclusions and provides more technical discussion of the incremental policy measures needed to strengthen these collective efforts.
Authors
Ralph C. Bryant is a senior fellow and the Edward M. Bernstein Scholar in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He has written numerous books and articles, including International Coordination of National Stabilization Policies (1995) and Turbulent Waters (2003).