Three major financial crises: What have we learned?

Few experts predicted the Asian Financial Crisis, Global Financial Crisis or Eurozone Debt Crisis, and we certainly do not pretend to be able to predict the next one. Yet history teaches that fragility, which periodically erupts into a full blown financial crisis, is an integral feature of market-based financial systems in spite of the advent of sophisticated risk management tools and regulatory systems. If anything, the increased frequency of modern crises in the wake of financial globalisation underscores how difficult it is to deal with systemic risk. We thus seek to compare these three major crises to distill the lessons to be learned and identify how to strengthen our financial systems