Karen Petrou: Why the World Needs a Financial Stability Board That Isn’t This Financial Stability Board
Donald Trump often upends conventional neoliberal wisdom, but one of the seemingly most frightening things the President-Elect espouses is contempt for the global order embodied in bastions such as the Bretton Woods international financial institutions, NATO, the UN, and the World Trade and Health Organizations. A less-known archetype of right global-order thinking is the Financial Stability Board. It has so far been spared by Mr. Trump, likely only because it has yet to come to his attention. Moving out ahead, two House Republicans vying for HFSC Chair are already insisting that each will, Samson-like, pull down the FSB’s banking, insurance, and securities pillars. Will the global financial system crumble to the lowest common denominator as FSB advocates proclaim? I doubt it. Indeed, shaking global financial standard-setters out of their well-stocked echo chamber could actually do global finance a world of good.
Like all the other global-order monuments, the FSB was founded with the very best of intentions. The 2008 crisis and warning tremors in the late 1990s proved at grave cost how financial earthquakes know no borders. What better than a new body of global financial standards akin to those that keep cross-border telecommunications humming to protect global banking, insurance, securities, commodities, and payments? And thus, the G20 brought forth the FSB in 2009.
The FSB promptly did the best it could as quickly as it could not only to ramp up subgroups such as a renewed Basel Committee, but also to tackle the absence of resolution protocols for the …