International institutions for reducing global financial instability

This paper asks how recent developments in research on banking and sovereign lending can help inform the debate on choosing a new international financial architecture. A broad range of plans is considered, including a global lender of last resort facility, an international bankruptcy court, an international debt insurance corporation, and unilateral controls on capital flows. One common failing of the main plans that have been proposed is that they fail to confront the biases in the existing system towards debt finance and bank intermediation, at the expense of equity finance and direct investment.