Building Global Finance Back Better: Using the Coronavirus Pandemic as a Platform to Redesign the Global Financial Architecture

Abstract

While the global coronavirus pandemic has put great strain on public finances across the world, it is those countries with weaker national currencies that will feel this pressure more strongly. There is a very real risk of national defaults and of a mutually reinforcing downward spiral of reduced trade and competitive currency devaluations. To prevent the health crisis becoming a financial crisis we need a renegotiation of the global financial architecture to create new institutions that can uphold stability, equity and sustainability between the world’s economies. Next year marks 50 years since the ending of the Bretton Woods arrangements and provides an ideal platform for such a negotiation.