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| In 2017, Mark Carney, then Bank of England governor and head of the FSB, highlighted climate change as a new risk to the global financial system.Peter Summers/Pool via Reuters files |
Global policy-makers shoved pandemic risk aside and spread climate alarm instead
One of the noble houses of global macroprudentialism, the International Monetary Fund, declared Tuesday that “The Great Lockdown” will plunge the global economy into the “worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago.” Along with the rest of the world’s economic overseers and protectors of financial stability, the IMF seems to have been unprepared for — and overwhelmed by — the arrival of COVID-19.
That the IMF was blindsided is clear in the opening words of Tuesday’s World Economic Outlook. “The world has changed dramatically in the three months since our last World Economic Outlook update on the global economy. A pandemic scenario had been raised as a possibility in previous economic policy discussions, but none of us had a meaningful sense of what it would look like on the ground and what it would mean for the economy.”
That’s some statement: “None of us” had a sense of what such a pandemic might impose on the world economy. It’s not clear who is included in the collective “us,” but it seems fair to assume the IMF is referring to the host of other members of the global fraternity of institutions that have assumed the role of guardians of the stability of the global financial system.
Among the institutions that should have been preparing for and assessing the risks of a global viral pandemic, in addition to the IMF, are the Financial Stability Board, the Bank for International Settlements, the G20 assembly of finance ministers, the World Bank and the European Central Bank.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which “none of us” had anticipated, these global entities and national authorities adopted “macroprudential policy” to prevent the next global financial meltdown and, if possible, prepare plans to deal with a new blow to global financial stability.
Wikipedia has an excellent and authoritative review of the origins of macroprudentialism, describing it as an “approach to financial regulation that aims to mitigate risk to the financial system as a whole.” In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, policy-makers and economic researchers backed the need to reorient the global regulatory framework “towards a macroprudential perspective.”
As the world sinks into lockdown and decline, one wonders why the whole macroprudential policy preparations, underway since the 2008 financial crisis and formally installed in 2016, so obviously failed to prepare for the financial stability shakeup brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic?
Source: Terence Corcoran | Financial Post
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