ABSTRACT
The 2007–9 financial crisis is, in fact, a structural–systemic crisis, as its ultimate causes lie in the structure of the payment system at both the national and international levels. A number of behavioral factors such as fraud and greed, predatory lending, and regulatory capture exacerbated the structural flaws of the payment system, but did not originate the global crisis observed in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ collapse on September 15, 2008. If so, then all new regulations being discussed or implemented at the time of writing – which focus and aim at impacting on a variety of agents’ behavior – miss the point, since neither the domestic payment system nor the international monetary regime is actually subject to a structural reform. Hence, in the absence of such a reform, another structural– systemic crisis can happen again. The fact that those banks that survived after the crisis (with or without public support) continue their “business as usual,” around the world, is a sign that nothing has changed on structural grounds both within and between domestic payment systems.
