As I write these words, the international economy is emerging from its most serious crisis since the Second World War. The Great Recession began in the US housing market, but quickly spread through the global network of financial institutions to affect every country in the world, most much more severely than the United States. The crisis has underscored weaknesses that had become apparent earlier in the institutions that govern the global economy – the International Monetary Fund (IMF, or the Fund), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Union (EU); each of these institutions suffers from a severe crisis of legitimacy and effectiveness. Sweeping changes have been proposed in the architecture of international governance, and significant reforms have been introduced in the IMF and the EU. Meanwhile, politics continues: many states are seeking unilateral or bilateral rather than multilateral policy solutions, and the existing international governance mechanisms appear to be inconsistent with the changing distribution of global power.

The IMF responded to the impact of the crisis in some of the peripheral countries, including Belarus, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Pakistan, Romania, Ukraine, and finally Greece, but its resources were woefully inadequate to address the problems in the core countries. As the crisis deepened, the IMF's leading members tripled the size of its available resources, but it was apparent that states and their central banks remained the major players in international finance. The EU was challenged by the depth of the financial crisis in its poorer members, which seemed to threaten the stability of the euro zone and called for coordinated responses that were slow to emerge.