'Financial globalisation' and the 'crisis': a critical assessment and 'what is to be done'?

Do we have a genuine global financial system? This article challenges the strong notion that the recent financial crisis was global in scope. It argues the international financial system is quite differentiated, being made up of domestic-national, supranational regional and international aspects. The system is characterised by contagion, however, and the article goes on to consider the role of this in generating spill-overs into the wider economic mechanism. Given this characterisation of the financial system the implications for how to organise a regulatory response are pursued. Here the argument is that the principle of 'distributed preparedness for resilience' should guide this response not a new set of top-down global rules and norms organised once again by the institutions of global economic governance