International Conference on Capital Flows and Safe Assets

From just after the Great Depression until the beginning of the 2007?09 financial crisis, the global financial system was relatively quiet, with no major calamity afflicting advanced economies. Although emerging markets periodically confronted crises, these events were usually limited to a small set of countries that tended to recover quickly. The devastating consequences of the financial crisis caught most policymakers and economists off guard. Policymakers and researchers from the U.S., China and Europe who studied triggers of the crisis gathered to discuss global financial industry stability and implications for monetary policy at the ?International Conference on Capital Flows and Safe Assets? in Shanghai, China. Presenters explored the role of capital flows and the scarcity of global safe assets in financial markets and exchanged ideas about crucial global economic issues such as monetary policy in the U.S. and China, the euro-area debt crisis and flaws in the global monetary system.