Market Mechanisms to Reduce the Need for IMF Bailouts

Should the IMF be the international lender of last resort? It played the leading role in the financial dramas in Mexico, Asia, Russia, and Brazil. Both Stanley Fischer and George Soros want to place the IMF-cum-international lender of last resort at the center of the new financial architecture (Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, 4 January 1999). Indeed, the IMF is the only institution that can coordinate large and immediate injections of credit when fast-moving global financial panics overwhelm sovereign nations and threaten to undermine international finance, global trade, and world growth.