This is an essential text for anyone working in the financial markets in Hong Kong. The book, written by a team of market professionals and academics associated with the Asian Institute of International Financial Law of the University of Hong Kong, provides a comprehensive review of the regulation of Hong Kong's financial markets

The global financial system has proven increasingly unstable and crisis-prone since the early 1980s. The system has failed to serve either creditors or debtors well. This has been reinforced by the global financial crisis of 2008, where we have seen systemic weaknesses bring rich countries to the brink of bankruptcy and visit appalling suffering on the poorest citizens of poor countries. Yet the regulatory responses to this crisis have involved little thinking from outside the box in which the crisis was delivered to the world. This book presents a powerful indictment of this regulatory failure and calls for greatly increased attention to international financial law and analyses new regulatory measures with the potential to make a new recognition of the principles that ought to underlie it. Using a historical approach that compares the various financial crises of the past three decades, the authors clearly show how misconceived economic policy responses have paved the way for each next 'crash'. Among the numerous topics that arise in the course of this revealing analysis are the following: overvalued exchange rates; excess liquidity in rich countries; premature liberalisation of local financial markets; capital controls; derivatives markets; accounting standards; credit ratings and the conflicts in the role of credit rating agencies; investor protection arrangements; insurance companies; and payment, clearing and settlement activities. The authors offer detailed commentary on: the role of multilateral development banks, the IMF and the WTO in responding to crises; the role of the Basel Accords, the Financial Stability Forum and Board, and the responses of the European Commission, the US, and the G20 to the most recent crisis. The book concludes by exploring systemic game-changing reforms such as bank levies, financial activities taxes and financial transaction taxes, and a global sovereign bankruptcy regime; as well as measures to remove the currency mismatches from the balance sheets of developing countries. Apart from its great usefulness as a detailed introduction to the international financial system and its regulation, the book is enormously valuable for its clear identification of the areas of regulatory failure, and its analysis of new regulatory approaches that offer the potential for a genuinely more stable system. Banking and investment policymakers at every level, the lawyers that serve these markets and the regulators that seek to regulate them, cannot afford to neglect this book.

The EU and the US responded to the global financial crisis by changing the rules for the functioning of financial services and markets and by establishing new oversight bodies. With the US Dodd–Frank Act and numerous EU regulations and directives now in place, this book provides a timely and thoughtful explanation of the key elements of the new regimes in both regions, of the political processes which shaped their content and of their practical impact. Insights from areas such as economics, political science and financial history elucidate the significance of the reforms. Australia's resilience during the financial crisis, which contrasted sharply with the severe problems that were experienced in the EU and the US, is also examined. The comparison between the performances of these major economies in a period of such extreme stress tells us much about the complex regulatory and economic ecosystems of which financial markets are a part.

We identify current challenges for creating stable, yet efficient financial systems using lessons from recent and past crises. Reforms need to start from three tenets: adopting a system-wide perspective explicitly aimed at addressing market failures; understanding and incorporating into regulations agents’ incentives so as to align them better with societies’ goals; and acknowledging that risks of crises will always remain, in part due to (unknown) unknowns – be they tipping points, fault lines, or spillovers. Corresponding to these three tenets, specific areas for further reforms are identified. Policy makers need to resist, however, fine-tuning regulations: a “do not harm” approach is often preferable. And as risks will remain, crisis management needs to be made an integral part of system design, not relegated to improvisation after the fact.

The 2008 global financial crisis brought the world's economy closer to collapse than ever before. Has enough been done to prevent another crisis?

This paper seeks to draw lessons for financial sector regulation and supervision and central bank liquidity management from the ongoing crisis, focusing principally on implications for the future rather than on immediate crisis management policies. Inadequacies in macroeconomic policies and the design of the international financial architecture exposed in the crisis will also have to be addressed to make the suggested changes in the regulatory framework effective.

This is a unique insider account of the new world of unfettered finance. The author, an Asian regulator, examines how old mindsets, market fundamentalism, loose monetary policy, carry trade, lax supervision, greed, cronyism, and financial engineering caused both the Asian crisis of the late 1990s and the current global crisis of 2008-2009. This book shows how the Japanese zero interest rate policy to fight deflation helped create the carry trade that generated bubbles in Asia whose effects brought Asian economies down. The study's main purpose is to demonstrate that global finance is so interlinked and interactive that our current tools and institutional structure to deal with critical episodes are completely outdated. The book explains how current financial policies and regulation failed to deal with a global bubble and makes recommendations on what must change.