The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the financial sector to a halt, much as it has the real economy.

The volatile dynamics that have produced crisis after crisis are thus temporarily frozen. The question is: Will governments take advantage of the interruption to put their financial houses in order so as to prepare them for the resumption of financial activity once the pandemic is under control?

This report by Focus on the Global South starts by showing how, prior to the pandemic, most of the reforms that were needed to prevent a repetition of the 2008-2009 financial crisis were not in place. For instance, investment instruments such as derivatives that had played such a key role in the 2008-2009 crisis, were still being traded. The “too big to fail” conundrum had, in fact, become worse, with more assets being concentrated in the top tier banks than before the crisis. To complicate things, there were new destabilizing elements that were not present during the Global Financial Crisis, the most important of which was China’s overheated financial sector.

The report then proceeds to list the 10 necessary reforms, giving in detail the reasons for each of them. The reforms, it notes, are changes that are non-neoliberal but they can be accommodated within a reformed capitalist system, though progressive alliances will need to be formed to secure them.

https://focusweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/A4_AfterCovid19_WEB.pdf