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Presentation by Claudio Borio, Head of Monetary and Economic Department of the BIS, at the INET conference "New Economic Thinking: Liberté, Égalité, Fragilité", Paris, 9 April 2015.
This excess financial elasticity view contrasts sharply with two more popular ones, which stress the failure of the system to prevent disruptive current account imbalances and its tendency to generate a structural shortage of safe assets - the "excess saving" and "excess demand for safe assets" views, respectively. In particular, the excess financial elasticity view highlights financial rather than current account imbalances and a persistent expansionary rather than contractionary bias in the system.
The failure to adjust domestic policy regimes and their international interaction raises a number of risks: entrenching instability in the global system; returning to the modern-day equivalent of the divisive competitive devaluations of the interwar years; and, ultimately, triggering an epoch-defining seismic rupture in policy regimes, back to an era of trade and financial protectionism and, possibly, stagnation combined with inflation.
The international monetary and financial system: its Achilles heel and what to do about it