The Centre for International Governance Innovation and the Centre for Economic Policy Research will host an event to mark the launch of the latest book by journalist Paul Blustein Laid Low, which goes behind the scenes to chronicle the International Monetary Fund’s role in the euro-zone crisis.
The importance of a muscular IMF, wielding power and authority commensurate with the strength of world markets, is greater than ever. The Fund is chief guardian of global financial stability, a role it fulfills mainly by seeking to prevent financial crises from occurring and managing them when they erupt, deploying the expertise of its staff and the monetary resources at its disposal. For all of its flaws, the Fund thereby provides what academics call a “global public good,” from which all nations broadly benefit and which no single nation can deliver alone.
Events in Europe during 2010–2015 taxed the Fund’s resources and tested its crisis-fighting mettle in ways that were inconceivable a few years earlier. The sums the Fund lent in the euro-zone were of unprecedented magnitudes, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the countries it was aiding. Also unprecedented was the scale of risk and complexity of forces that the Fund was confronting as it laboured to keep a financial conflagration from engulfing a regional economy comprising nearly one-fifth of global output as measured by gross domestic product (GDP).
Registration will open at 17:30, followed be presentation and discussion from 18:00 - 19:00 and drinks reception from 19:00 - 20:00.
