Charles Kindleberger used to say, “the international financial system doesn’t work unless somebody takes the responsibility for it” (as quoted by Fisher, 2008).   Second, those participants are more diverse from the point of view of their economic structure, their demography, their level of development, and, more importantly, their social choices and preferences. For instance, different saving rates may be seen as resulting from divergent time preferences. Likewise, asymmetries in financial development may, to some extent, reflect different choices and tradeoffs between efficiency and stability in the organisation of capital markets and the architecture of financial systems.   Finally, linkages between economies, whether through trade, capital or more intangible “confidence” channels are continuously getting stronger as witnessed by  1  See, for instance, the proposals aiming at separating the “surveillance” and “financing” functions and making the former more independent from the Executive Board. 2  BIS Review 76/2010  the speed and amplitude of contagion of economic and financial shocks during the last eighteen months, which took everybody by surprise. Pending some economic catastrophe, these characteristics will persist over time. A large number of different countries, with different preferences, will permanently be linked and interdependent through active, but imperfect capital markets. Any future international architecture must be compatible with those basic features of today’s world which, prima facie, create the potential for more complexity and, maybe, instability. International capital markets and the allocation of savings Let’s suppose, for an instant, that there is a unified, fully integrated, and complete world capital market.
Instead, I will focus on three topics: international capital markets, the provision of international liquidity and the newly emerging question of an international store of value. These are issues of joint and common interest for all countries, whether emerging or developed, and whether their current account is in surplus or deficit. Getting to a common understanding on those matters would help in making progress on other, more contentious questions. Opinions expressed are solely mine and do not represent the views of Banque de France or the Eurosystem. What is an international monetary system? According to an apt definition, an international monetary system consists of (i) exchange rate arrangements; (ii) capital flows; and (iii) a collection of institutions, rules, and conventions that govern its operation (Carney, 2009). Presumably, the purpose of such “institutions, rules, and conventions” is to ensure the sustainability and mutual consistency between national policies. There may be also an implicit objective of “fairness” in the sense that, when international imbalances need to be corrected, the burden of adjustment should be equitably shared. Accordingly, an international monetary system should be based on explicit or implicit “rules of the games” to which national economic policies would be subordinated. This is an ambitious approach and it may seem too normative to some. But it has a long history:   the gold standard, from which the phrase “rules of the games” originated, was based on mechanisms which imposed automatic and symmetric adjustments in balance of payments, according to specie flows.