Sunday, November 27, 2011

G-20 annual progress card on the International Monetary System reforms


EDWIN TRUMAN, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics tracks the progress made by the G-20 over the past year on reform of the international monetary system over five key areas: i) surveillance of the global economy and financial system, ii) the international lender-of-last-resort mechanisms (global financial safety nets), iii) he management of global capital flows, iv) reserve assets and reserve currencies, and v) IMS governance.
In his policy brief for the PIIE Quarterly, “G-20 Reforms of the International Monetary System: An Evolution”, he states that little progress had been made on most of the topics except for commitments by a few countries to allow their automatic stabilizers to operate in the current slowdown and marginal steps forward on the issues of the lender-of-last-resort issues, and codification of the progress made on the management of capital flows. He concludes that although the G-20 summit at Cannes resulted in some useful mutual education, there wasn’t much more in terms of concrete accomplishments.

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