Financial crises and the multilateral response: What the historical record shows

Abstract

We provide a synoptic description of financial crises and the multilateral response over the course of the last four decades. We present both indicators of economic performance around crisis dates and a comprehensive description of multilateral rescue efforts. While emergency lending has grown, reliance on debt restructuring, broadly speaking, has declined. This leads us to ask what can be done to rebalance the management of debt problems toward a better mix of emergency lending and private sector burden sharing. In particular, we explore the idea of sovereign cocos, contingent debt securities that automatically reduce payment obligations in the event of debt-sustainability problems.