ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes the formation of expectations by three international financial organizations—the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and the Working Party 3 of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—and uses two economic crisis periods to show that the organizations used different procedures to anticipate potential crises. Although it was often possible to predict crises, between 1960 and 1982 the insights gained hardly led to any appropriate political interventions to prevent the anticipated crisis. This may have been due to a number of reasons. One first specific reason will be discussed in greater detail in this chapter, specifically the relationship between expectation formation processes relevant for international financial policy cooperation and the repeated decision not to regulate international financial market transactions. Finally, based on the sovereign debt crises of the 1980s, it will be shown that the previously established long-term procedures were also distrusted due to the feeling of strong economic uncertainty.
