Impactos en indicadores de segundo nivel

The central bankers and supervisors who came together to create the FSB in 2009 appeared to operate as an epistemic community; prior to the latest crisis, the grouping was perhaps a gradually coalescing nascent epistemic community (Kapstein, 1992; Helleiner, 1994). Post- crisis, they were a community with a largely common experience of crisis management, and a common conception of the anomalies that led to the rising crisis, its causes, and a clear sense of possible solutions and notions of validity, all of which are prerequisites for a paradigm shift to occur and for a new policy consensus to begin to take hold.

This small community facilitated policy convergence, bound by knowledge and expertise and experience of common policy problems and solutions (Bennett, 1991; Kingdon, 2011). Once policy options became clear, they assisted in efficient top-down information diffusion (Levi- Faur, 2005), via ties that connected otherwise unconnected communities across geography, culture, and political and economic factors (Lazer, 2005). The community—comprised of a small number of top central bankers and supervisors whose lives were consumed with crisis management during 2007-2008—prepared the ground for international policy harmonisation (Holzinger and Knill, 2005). As early as late 2008 and the spring of 2009, the outline of a new policy narrative was taking shape.

The G20 set the process of reform going, with an investment of collective political capital. There was an ‘alignment of leaders and technocrats’ and, on the actual policy prescriptions, ‘technical professionals were allowed to figure it out’ (Interview 22, 2012, p. 12). The central banking and supervisory community was tasked with identifying the proximate causes of the crisis and possible policy solutions. It is not necessary to revisit them all in detail, but causes of the crisis include global imbalances driving a credit boom in deficit countries (Smaghi, 2008); unintended consequences of the great moderation (Gudmundsson, 2008); excess leverage in banks (Draghi, 2008; King, 2010; Turner, 2009b); poor risk management and excessive risk taking (King, 2009a); opacity in complex interconnected global securities markets, which acted as a risk and panic transmission mechanism for the crisis (Buchanan, 2013; Gudmundsson, 2008; Weber, 2008); and a failure of supervision and oversight of markets and firms (G30, 2009a). Having a common crisis-driven conception of the nature of

the failures, it was then possible for the community to coalesce relatively quickly around a new paradigm or approach in response to the crisis and its anomalies.

Table 4.1 modifies Kapstein’s 1992 view of the common beliefs of the central banking community (Kapstein, 1992, p. 282), and updates it with the post-crisis position. It

underscores that the central banking community has shared causalbeliefs, principled beliefs, and, a shared project: the internationally coordinated macro-prudential supervision of the system as a whole—overseen by the FSB.

Table: 4.1 Shared Beliefs and Common Policy Project of the Central Banking Epistemic Community Postcrisis

Shared causal beliefs

Shared principled beliefs

Shared policy project

The economic and financial crisis threatened a collapse of the world economy and the global financial system. It was driven by excess risk, leverage, opacity in complex interconnected markets and firms, and a failure of supervision and oversight of firms and destructive unregulated markets.

The international trade and payments system is a common good. Central banks should ensure financial stability and the safety and soundness of the system. They should act as providers of liquidity and lenders of last resort. Markets and firms are incapable of providing system stability. Internationally coordinated re-regulation of global markets and firms utilizing macro-prudential tools and

mechanisms and increased capital to ensure long-term financial stability. Regulation and supervision will focus on the stability of the system as a whole and on large interconnected individual firms.

Table 4.1 Shared Beliefs and Common Policy Project of the Central Banking Epistemic Community Post-crisis

The community thus responded by offering a new consensus which is based on a rejection of laissez-faire neo-liberalism’s worshipping of deregulated financial markets. In its place, the community moved to champion a series of macro-prudential solutions that address what they view as gaps and failures in the previous architecture. We can identify among central bankers a broad-based call for a meaningful reassertion of collective state power and for the systemic re-regulation of global markets and systemically important firms, in the sense that the calls become insistent and consistent from many sources. Actors within the community demand a

markets (Noyer, 2008, p. 1; see also Caruana, 2009; Darling 2011). The prior approach is seen as having been too narrow (Noyer, 2009). The response would therefore include greater macro-prudential oversight of markets and firms and enhanced capital and liquidity standards (Draghi, 2008; Turner 2009a), and would address procyclical tendencies (Caruana, 2009; Xiaochuan, 2009) and run across the economic business cycle, i.e., apply during boom and bust periods (White, 2008).

The FSB move towards financial market reform and stronger global regulation during this crisis period is explicitly characterized as a new ‘consensus’ by various sources (Blanchard et

al., 2012; Constancio, 2010; Smaghi, 2008. p. 3). What is being constructed is a policy

‘consensus amongst the elite that operates, in first instance, above the fray of domestic politics’ (Bennett, 1991, p. 225). Members of the community stress that consensus solutions, as specified at the Washington Summit and which would be laid out in still further detail at the London and Pittsburgh Summits, would require ‘greater international coordination, requiring concerted efforts by international organizations’ (Watanagase, 2008, p.3), and a strengthening of the international architecture (Noyer, 2009); hence, the need for a new structure or forum to match the ambitious policy goals.

These central banker and supervisory responses show many elements that are indicators of an epistemic community. The group exhibits a shared set of causal and principled beliefs and notions of validity. From 2008 onwards, the community rapidly developed a common policy consensus and enterprise which includes a series of policy responses to the crisis and

internationally coordinated reforms. As with other such epistemic communities, the actors knew each other very well and tended to trust one another (Adler, 1992). They operated as a ‘network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence’ (Haas, 1992a, p. 3). They are deferred to for technical expertise by political leaders, and they, also unlike some other communities of experts, have the independent regulatory authority to make policy changes in many key areas they identified for reform.

This is what was occurring through the output of the G20 summits and during the financial reform process. As with other epistemic communities, the ability of the central banking community to seize the policy-making initiative is buttressed by the deference shown to the group as knowledge elites to whom the leaders defer, especially in stages one and two of their response. The regulatory issues are very complex and technical in nature, and this forced G20 leaders to turn to the community for advice, as has happened in other cases (Haas, 1992b),

sometimes on the basis of incomplete knowledge, which some government officials report they later regret (Interviews 13 and 17, 2012). This expert community thus influences the debate, provides the technical knowledge, identifies cooperative options and, in this case at the very outset, pushes for the creation of an institutional structure that could build collective vested interests into the international reform process (Adler, 1992)—the FSB itself.

Crucially, it is the combination of relative clarity on external anomalies and causes, coupled to a strong epistemic community and the coalescence around a common policy consensus, which increased the probability of a paradigm shift in worldview and linked policy outcomes (see Figure 2.1, p.33).

Because this combination is present in this crisis, the re-regulatory shift begins, and this community proves to be the most influential transnational policy network below the G20 level, one key to the creation of a Board that the community would then go on to dominate during the first four years of the policy-making process.

The G20 leaders solicited the community’s views and advice, adopted much of it, and then delegated responsibility to those actors to monitor progress and carry it out (Haas, 1992a). In conclusion, a relatively small group of central bankers and supervisors acting as an epistemic community turns out to be crucial to the output of the G20 summitry and related policy processes.