ABSTRACT
The wave of currency and banking crises that began in 1997 in East Asia, then spread to many other emerging markets, and even threatened to spill over to the U.S., generated a broad consensus that fundamental reforms were required in the international financial system. International financial instability was widely seen as a global public good (Griffith-Jones, 2001), and the existing institutions and arrangements were largely viewed as inadequate for dealing with very large and extremely volatile capital flows, in which an important part of the volatility was caused by large imperfections in the financial markets themselves.
