ABSTRACT
The litany of crises in emerging markets over the past decade exposed the Achilles’ Heel of the existing global financial system: free capital mobility does not lead to stable growth regimes in the South, but instead, to bubble-led (inflated asset prices) growth. In response to the growing turmoil in the international financial system, leaders from the G7 countries established a series of formal and informal networks and policies that cut across various institutions and organizations in the hope of strengthening the existing international financial system, or what has been referred to as the New International Financial Architecture (or the NIFA). Despite its novel form, the NIFA does not, I suggest, represent a radical altering of the underlying neo-liberal premise upon which the existing international financial system has been based since the demise of the Bretton Woods system (1944-71), namely, the norm of free capital mobility (Soederberg 2004).
