Since the 1980s, the global financial system has faced several crises which forced regulators to consider new conjectural and structural problems. After a period of expansion for the world economy, the cycle has gradually moved towards a smoothed rate of growth which has implied a revision of economic and financial objectives.

The emergence of new partners like China and India has increased the amount of liquidity necessary to support economic development. Pressures on primary goods have led to a general increase of prices and the return of inflation for most developed countries.

These fluctuations of prices have made speculative strategies more valuable. At the same time, investors have adopted more and more risky attitudes. Financial scandals (Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat, etc) and several crises (New Technologies Bubbles, the subprime crisis, etc) enable economists and financial analysts to the following conclusions. First systemic risk has increased during the last thirty years. To solve this problem, regulators have led rules to evaluate information more efficiently (for example, in the implementation of the IFRS). If necessary, the actual crisis illustrates that it far from sufficient. Auditing agencies, in charge of evaluating information and risk for both enterprises and banking institutions have failed to provide investors and regulators with adequate data regarding the value of their clients. More improvement towards their independence should be made to guarantee their efficiency.

Second, long-term strategy must prevail over short-term financial decisions. The recent collapses of exchange places despite rescue measures (both in the United States and in Europe) exhibit the importance of anticipation as a factor in reaching stability for financial markets. Actually, both governments and regulators deploy enormous effort to re-establish the proper conditions for an effective functioning of the real economic sphere. Therefore, recreating a confident atmosphere for our international world appears to be a difficult problem to solve.

Third, aggressive capitalism has exhibited its limits. The bankruptcies of several banks in Europe and over-indebtedness all around the world have led to an enormous amount of liquidity whose primary use was essentially speculative investment.