2009 Reports

Introduction: Time for a Visible Hand: Lessons From the 2008 World Financial Crisis

Griffith-Jones, Stephany; Ocampo, Jose A.; Stiglitz, Joseph E.

The world financial meltdown of 2008 has shattered into pieces the sophisticated but conceptually hollow premise on which the framework of self-regulating markets had been built. The dominance of this conceptual apparatus in recent decades has left, as its legacy, the worst global financial crisis since the Great Crash of 1929, the worst recession since the Second World War and a collapse of international trade. As a result, the world is also experiencing a mounting social crisis, reflected in particular in escalating unemployment and underemployment, and significant reductions in the value of pension funds. The developing world, which had been experiencing in recent years one of its best growth records in history, has also been dragged into the crisis.