Let us rehearse the arguments about why finance matters. Finance allows individuals and firms to disconnect in time and space their abilities to earn and their abilities to spend and hence concentrate on one or other at any particular moment. The advantages of specialisation are clear – everyone can benefit from the greater production of goods and services by allowing agents the inter-temporal as well as geographical options to share resources. But we do know that the efficient allocation of funds from savers to borrowers is subject to severe informational constraints and also various temptations to renege: the avoidance of these problems requires significant regulation, institutional capability and investment in reputation-building. These kind of first order problems do not in general sort themselves out and it is possible even to write about the vast sweep of economic development itself in terms of the history of solutions, failed or otherwise, to these types of problems.

So we can expect that alongside the development of financial instruments we will have to re-write the book of rules and regulations every generation or so, as we moved from heavyweight capital controls in the immediate post-war era under Bretton Woods to an era of neo-liberalism running from the late 1970s to about now. But let us not take the initial premise too far in that the problems with the global financial system are best solved by reducing the size of that system because it seems likely that at least some of the problems stem from its incompleteness rather than its pre-eminence. Let me illustrate: it is entirely proper that capital flows from ‘impatient’ countries to ‘patient’ countries and at some real interest rate the deficits of the impatient must equal the surpluses of the patient. Over time the patient countries will then build up claims or assets against the debts of the impatient countries. Now let us suppose that the patient countries become wealthier, say as their productivity levels catch-up. Consequently, all this extra wealth is saved, global savings will then initially exceed investment and interest rates will have to fall to clear the global market for savings, encouraging the impatient to become more impatient and increase their overall level of indebtedness.

For impatient read the US and for patient read China. Under this equilibrium real rates are low and capital flows uphill from fast-growing economies to mature economies. The problem here is that the extra savings are all being sent to the impatient, and there is no vehicle for the patient to invest in their own economy. In a closed economy, the extra income would have to be channelled domestically and domestic growth would be stimulated in order to use the savings. And so by the same token, if there is an inadequate development of savings vehicles in the patient economies then these savings will tend to drive up the prices of existing assets, for example, US Treasury notes which will be in short supply. This global excess demand for assets hence drives down real interest rates raising other asset prices in turn, for example housing, equity or real commodities.

It is thus the lack of financial development in emerging economies which arguably lies at the heart of the problem of this financial crisis and not, perversely, the excess of financial development. An example from the most recent IMF Article IV report from October 2006 for China suffices to illustrate the point: the foreign exchange rate market remains tightly managed, there seems to be little development of bond markets even at maturities of less than one-year and little or no availability of bonds in the 1-10 year maturity range and equity markets seem not to allow firms to access the market. Overall the IMF view was that the ‘limited role of capital markets in China…reflects the dominance of state banks in intermediation, but these markets are plagued with regulatory and governance problems’. Obviously a report from late 2006 may well be out of date but it does clearly illustrate the point about a lack of liquid assets in newly emerging economies at the high watermark period of so-called financial excesses.

So rather than shunning financial market development, global policies ought to think more about deepening capital markets and encouraging the development of assets across the risk spectrum, particularly in parts of the world where surpluses are being generated. By helping the development of such assets, policy makers will help raise global real rates, help to prevent the conditions under which asset price bubbles will develop and also help to get various parts of the world onto more sustainable growth paths that are not reliant on the capacious appetites of Western-style consumption alone. And if as a consequence, we become a little more patient and they become a little more impatient, then we have all become a lot closer to each other, which is a rather pleasant thought.

Jagjit Chadha is Professor of Economics at the University of Kent.

This article originally appeared at Calibrecon