Fabrizio Saccomanni: The global crisis and the future of the international
monetary system
Speech by Mr Fabrizio Saccomanni, Director General of the Bank of Italy, at the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, 15 April 2010.
* * *
The global crisis that hit the world economy since August 2007 has revived the long dormant
debate about the adequacy of the institutional arrangements required to ensure stability in
international economic and financial relationships on a global scale.
The financial roots of the crisis have been widely analysed. Here, I intend to focus more on
the macroeconomic drivers. I will try to argue that they are ultimately connected to a number
of long-standing features of the international monetary system such as it has evolved since
the demise of the Bretton Woods regime. I will then review the main options available to
reform the international monetary and financial system.
1. The global crisis and its macroeconomic roots
There is now a broad consensus that, even though the global crisis was triggered by
dysfunctions in the financial system, unbalanced global macroeconomic conditions
contributed to the accumulation of large financial vulnerabilities (Visco, 2009 and 2010).
The proximate cause of the crisis was the US housing boom, financed by an unprecedented
expansion of mortgage lending. Regulators' failure to correct the incentive distortions
introduced by financial innovation can largely explain the deterioration of lending standards,
the widespread use of opaque financial instruments and the excessive risk-taking on the part
of many international banks. Excessively easy monetary conditions contributed to encourage
the rapid growth in mortgage borrowing and fed the rise in house prices.
An easy monetary policy in the US and Japan - and, to a lesser extent, in the euro area -
translated into a loose global monetary stance. Very low interest rates in main financial
centers encouraged capital flows to economies with higher interest rates, which were
induced to ease policy in turn, in order to avoid an excessive currency appreciation.
Countries that pegged their exchange rate to the dollar effectively adopted the US monetary
policy stance, and absorbed capital inflows by accumulating large official reserves.
The investment of official reserves in US Treasury securities financed the growing US current
account deficit and, at the same time, contributed to keep Treasury bond yields low.
Investors turned increasingly toward riskier assets in their "search for yield", leading to a
compression of risk premia on a broad range of financial assets, from equities to corporate
and sovereign bonds, thereby boosting asset valuations. National housing price cycles,
usually mainly driven by country-specific factors, became highly synchronized globally.
For several years this financial market exuberance went hand-in-hand with sustained global
growth and price stability, thus feeding the illusion that the conduct of economic and
especially monetary policy could reduce underlying risks, and that whatever risk was left
could be easily diversified or shifted to those in a better position to bear it by efficient and
sophisticated financial markets. The "speed limit" for the global economy appeared for a
while to have been permanently raised, as the entry of China and other emerging economies
in the global trading system effectively increased the world's labour supply. At some point,
however, bottlenecks emerged in commodity markets and global inflation picked up sharply.
As monetary policy was tightened and housing markets peaked, also the degree of risk
diversification turned out to be more limited and the risk management practices of financial
intermediaries much less sound than it had been previously assumed.
As the initial turmoil evolved into a fully-fledged crisis, the sharp fall in consumer and investor
confidence translated into a dramatic and simultaneous contraction of demand, output and
international trade, not only in advanced but also in emerging economies, which had hitherto
been largely immune from the crisis' fallout. The severity and the highly synchronized
character of the world recession can only be fully understood by considering that the financial
crisis had hit what had been until then the keystone of global economic growth, i.e. the ability
of US consumers to continue borrowing and spending. Without that "consumer of last resort",
the whole edifice crumbled.
2. Flaws in existing international monetary arrangements
There is a close connection between the macroeconomic imbalances that paved the way to
the global crisis and some key features of existing international monetary arrangements.
The Bretton Woods regime of adjustable exchange rate pegs collapsed in 1971-73 under the
combined pressure of increased capital mobility and conflicting policy objectives among the
largest economies. It has since been replaced by a "non system", which is simply the result
of individual countries' choices among a broad menu of exchange rate regimes, ranging from
monetary unions and hard pegs to freely floating rates. Market pressure resulted in the
gradual removal of capital controls, first in industrialised countries and then, from the 1990s,
in emerging ones, paving the way to global financial integration. At the same time, increasing
trade integration continued to provide a strong motive for countries to try to avoid excessive
exchange rate fluctuations, since large and persistent exchange rate movements are difficult
to hedge against and discourage the establishment of trade relationships that require
substantial long-term investment.
Thus, contrary to predictions that increased capital mobility would lead to a polarization of
exchange regimes around the extremes of either "hard pegs" or flexible exchange rates,
many countries still adopt intermediate regimes, including various types of crawling pegs or
managed floating. Individual countries' exchange rate preferences can reflect a variety of
structural factors and policy objectives. The result of these individual choices is a situation
where a large number of countries de facto peg to the US dollar or actively manage their
bilateral exchange rates with it; a smaller number of countries peg to the euro or to a basket;
and several countries (mostly industrialized ones) allow exchange rates to float.
This non-system lacks a mechanism capable of ensuring the global consistency of national
objectives. The consequence has been a recurrent systemic instability (see Saccomanni,
2008):

since the 1970s exchange rates among the major currencies have experienced
very large fluctuations with serious consequences for the real economy. Periods
of US dollar overvaluation have entailed the demise of important US manufacturing
sectors and have been accompanied by strong protectionist pressures; on the other
hand, when the dollar was weak, upward pressures on the yen and on European
currencies destabilized the respective economies and greatly complicated the
conduct of policies. For example, in Japan in the late 1980s the easy monetary
stance to counter the yen's appreciation allowed a huge speculative bubble to
develop; the subsequent phase of yen appreciation in the early to mid-1990
exacerbated the economy's slide into stagnation.

the last thirty years have seen repeated episodes of currency and financial
crises in emerging economies (the Latin America debt crisis of the early 1980s;
Mexico in 1994; South-East Asia in 1997; Russia in 1998; Argentina in 2002).
Although the proximate cause of each crisis could be identified in specific policy
errors and structural/political weaknesses of the countries in question, a clear
pattern recurs through all of them: a protracted underestimation of risks on the part
of lenders, followed by an abrupt change in perceptions and a "sudden stop" in
capital flows. The excesses of market optimism were usually connected to easy
global monetary conditions, and the trigger of the crisis was often a monetary
tightening in the United States.

the past 10-15 years have seen a sharp widening of current account
imbalances. The US deficit widened from 1.7 per cent of GDP in 1997 to 6 per cent
in 2006 with, as a counterpart, growing surpluses in Japan, China and the oil
exporting countries. The external imbalances largely reflected unbalanced domestic
conditions: a sequence of asset price bubbles in the United States (the dot-com
bubble in the late 1990s, the housing bubble after 2000); a sharp rise in saving and
fall in investment in several Asian economies in reaction to the crisis of 1997; an
extremely high saving propensity in China. A widely shared concern has been that
current account imbalances could be at some point be regarded by the markets as
unsustainable, triggering a sharp reversals of capital flows with destabilising
consequences for the exchange rates of major currencies.
Underlying these manifestations of global instability are some fundamental weaknesses of
the existing international monetary arrangements.
First, a well-functioning international monetary system must impose some form of
discipline
on national economic policies. In its original conception the Bretton Woods system
assumed that the discipline would be based on a set of rules enforced collectively through
the International Monetary Fund. Now the enforcement of discipline is entirely left to the
markets and this poses several problems. First of all, its enforcement is far from uniform and
symmetric: unsustainable current account surpluses are not sanctioned in the same way as
deficits, and the country issuing the dominant reserve currency is largely immune, since it
can finance deficits in its own currency as long as other countries are willing to accumulate
reserves. Moreover, financial markets do not always sanction unsustainable policies
consistently, because their perceptions of fundamentals can vary over time and are often
overshadowed by other drivers of capital flows. After long phases of disregard for mounting
risks, markets often react "too much - too late", resulting in sharp "boom and bust" cycles.
Thus, market reactions often encouraged authorities to act in highly pro-cyclical ways.
Secondly, the international monetary system, like a domestic monetary regime, needs to
provide a global anchor to stabilize inflation expectations, by ensuring that the monetary
stance is appropriate on a global scale. The anchor, in earlier times provided by a link to
gold, is now in practice dependent on the monetary policy frameworks of the major
economies. However, even when these countries adopt a sound monetary stance, this does
not automatically ensure an appropriate stance at a global level, since policies conducted
with a narrow national focus may overlook global sources of inflationary pressures: the
recent commodity price boom, driven by buoyant global demand, is a case in point.
Moreover, countries that peg their currencies to the dollar (or otherwise shadow US
monetary policy) effectively adopt the US policy stance. When many countries do this, the
US monetary stance effectively becomes the prevailing stance in a large part of the world.
This can lead to global monetary conditions that are either to easy or too tight for the world
economy.
A third important feature of the international monetary system is how it influences the
demand for official reserves and how that demand is met. The global demand for reserves
has increased enormously over the past 10-15 years: foreign exchange reserves rose from
about 1.4 trillion US dollars in 1995 to 7.5 trillion in 2009. An important motive for reserve
holding has been precautionary: official reserves allow authorities to offset capital outflows in
the event of "sudden stops", avoiding exchange rate depreciations or the need to seek
conditional financing. Reserve accumulation could also be the by-product of an export-led
growth strategy, as in the case of China. The accumulation of reserves by individual
countries can, however, involve some important negative externalities for the global
economy, as well as for the countries themselves. In order to accumulate reserves countries
need either to run current account surpluses or to attract (and then usually sterilize)
substantial capital inflows. To this end, they will compress domestic demand by
implementing tight monetary and/or fiscal policies which may result, in the aggregate, in a
deflationary bias on the world economy.
In summary, the present arrangement is not able to enforce an effective discipline on
national economic policies in a reliable, timely and symmetric way; it cannot ensure that the
global monetary policy stance is appropriate to global conditions; and by encouraging
countries to accumulate huge official reserves, which finance the current account deficits of
the reserve currency country, it tends to feed large and persistent global imbalances.
3. The options for reform
In reviewing the potential alternatives to the present "non-system", a first necessary step is to
clear the ground from seemingly "simple" and "automatic" solutions. A return to a regime of
fixed exchange rates or a move to full and universal exchange rate flexibility are the two
polar cases most frequently considered. I would argue that neither is feasible or desirable.1
3.1 Exchange rate-based reform options
A system of rigidly fixed exchange rates would be impractical (unless there was a political
willingness to establish a single world currency) and would not be viable without a return to
generalised restrictions on capital mobility. Capital controls would need to be very pervasive
to have any effectiveness, implying prohibitive costs and setting back financial development
by several decades.
The option of free floating has in theory a number of advantages: i) it would not require to
accumulate reserves to stabilize the exchange rate; ii) it would preserve monetary policy
autonomy; iii) it would protect each country from external monetary shocks; iv) markets
would enforce an effective and symmetrical discipline on national policies across all
countries; v) it would avoid imbalances and instability as long as each country maintained its
own house in order.
The real world is, however, far from the idealized representation of the theory. When the
hypotheses of perfectly flexible prices and costless adjustment are abandoned, and we
consider the actual working of the financial system in a world of imperfect information and
incomplete markets, the presumption that exchange rates will smoothly adjust to reflect
changes in fundamentals soon appears unrealistic. In practice, changing market perceptions
may make exchange rates volatile and lead them to diverge from fundamentals, especially
where markets are thin and uncertainty high, as it is often the case in emerging economies.
This experience explains why so many countries have displayed in practice a strong "fear of
floating".
If we exclude the two "pure" exchange rate regimes, the only option available is that of a
"managed" system based on international cooperation. However, it would be misleading to
suppose that the starting point of any reform must be the choice of the exchange rate
regime. There are other important features that deeply affect the functioning of the
international monetary system: the role and effectiveness of international institutions; the
multilateral surveillance process; the available mechanisms for creating international
reserves; international trade rules and the mechanism for resolving trade disputes; and the
regulatory framework for international financial markets. Not surprisingly, much of the recent
discussion in the G20 on how to improve the functioning of the system has centered on these
issues.
3.2 Towards an SDR-based international monetary system?
Before turning to the G20 strategy, I would like to review a proposal by Zhou Xiaochuan, the
Governor of the People's Bank of China (Zhou, 2009). After identifying a fundamental
problem of the present international monetary system as stemming from the fact that a
national currency is used as the main international reserve asset, Governor Zhou suggested
"an international reserve currency that is
that one of the goals of its reform should be creating
disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run". Indeed, "a
super-sovereign reserve currency managed by a global institution could be used to both
create and control global
liquidity". More specifically, he argued that the SDR, issued by the
IMF, has the potential to become such a super-sovereign currency and that its role should be
more actively promoted in the future, both through further increases in SDR allocations and
by enhancing its use in international trade and in financial transactions.
A proposal to increase SDR allocations has already been approved last year by IMF member
governments; the new large SDR allocation, the first after many years, has effectively
multiplied by a factor of 10 the outstanding amount of SDRs. Nevertheless, even after the
latest increase, SDRs still represent less than 5 per cent of global foreign exchange
reserves.
The proposal that the IMF and the international community should actively promote the use
of the SDR in trade an financial transactions is equally stimulating, and has been echoed by
several academics and policy-makers.2 At present, the SDR can be regarded as an
international currency only in a limited sense of the term, because it is a basket of currencies,
is not issued by a central bank, and its use is restricted to "authorised" institutions of the
official sector. Countries cannot use SDRs directly to intervene in the exchange market, but
need first to convert them into a "true" currency. In any case the possibility to use SDRs
directly in interventions would require, first of all, the existence of a private SDR market. This,
however, has never taken off in practice, even though no technical obstacles to it would
seem to exist.
In this regard, it is interesting to contrast the case of the SDR with that of the ECU, the
basket of currencies introduced in 1979 in the context of the European Monetary System
which eventually merged into the euro. While the use of ECU, much like the SDR, was
restricted to transactions among official holders, during the 1980s and 1990s a large private
market of ECU-denominated financial instruments developed. Substantial amounts of
ECUdenominated bonds were issued and an interbank market in ECU deposits developed,
supported by an agreement among a group of private banks to establish an ECU clearing
arrangement, as well as markets in a wide array of ECU derivative instruments. In this
context European central banks acquired reserves in private ECUs, which could be used to
carry out interventions directly in ECU. The rapid growth of a private ECU market benefited
from the support of Community institutions and some national official institutions (including
the Bank of England), which issued debt denominated in ECU, thus providing the critical
mass that helped the market to take off. Moreover, EU institutions assured legal certainty of
the definition of the ECU basket and its continuity.
As in the case of the ECU, instruments denominated in a basket - like the SDR - that
included all the major currencies would represent a natural hedge for companies whose
business is global. Once a liquid market for SDR instruments existed, it should be attractive
for such companies to manage the bulk of their financial operations in SDRs rather than in
the individual currencies. The crucial difficulty, however, is reaching the critical mass that
would allow the development of a deep, diversified and liquid market, where transaction
costs would be sufficiently low that the natural advantages of the SDR can emerge. Given
the inertia that comes with network externalities and economies of scale and of scope,
reaching such a critical mass would be virtually impossible unless public policy plays an
active role. The type of actions that were used to foster the development of the ECU market
could be a starting point.3 Over time, the SDR could become widely used in trade
transactions. Producers of internationally traded commodities may want to set prices in a unit
that is a much better proxy than the dollar of the composition of their imports. This, in turn,
would encourage trade invoicing in SDR, creating a further inducement for countries to hold
reserves in SDR. It is likely that for the SDR, incentives to its use as a unit of account, means
of payment and store of value would be mutually reinforcing.
Enhancing the role of the SDR may require, at some point, revising the composition of the
SDR basket in order to make it more representative of the world's main economic regions.
Two elements should, however, be kept in mind: first, for operational reasons, it would be
preferable to continue to restrict the basket to a limited number of major currencies; second,
all the component currencies should be fully convertible and have well developed financial
markets with full capital mobility, since by allowing arbitrage to keep the valuation of
SDRbased instruments in line with that of instruments in the component currencies, this would
facilitate both their development and their acceptance. This implies that the inclusion of the
Chinese renminbi in the SDR basket, highly desirable on economic grounds, may
nonetheless need to be postponed until sufficiently developed and open renminbi financial
markets exist.
It is important now to ask in which ways an enhanced role of the SDR could contribute to
address the fundamental flaws of the existing international monetary system. This is a
complex question and I have only some tentative answers. First, once the SDR becomes a
true reserve asset, there would be an incentive for countries with a broadly diversified set of
trading partners to manage their currencies with reference to the SDR, while those that are
closely integrated with one particular region could continue to maintain a link to a regional
currency (the dollar, the euro and, in the future, the renminbi). Countries that peg or manage
exchange rates vis-à-vis the SDR would presumably choose to accumulate reserves in
SDRs rather than in US dollars. Second, regular IMF allocations of SDRs, and the fact that
these would be regarded as "true" reserves, would help diminish the pressure for countries to
try to accumulate other currencies by maintaining undervalued exchange rates and sterilizing
capital inflows, which in the recent past has been a driving factor behind the widening of
global imbalances.
I think these effects would be important contributions to a more balanced and stable system,
although they would be felt only gradually as the SDR increases its role. Still, two important
issues would remain unresolved. First, exchange rates among the major currencies may
continue to undergo wide fluctuations, even though these may have less destabilising effects
on third currencies to the extent that many of these would be linked to the SDR. Second,
since the SDR would remain a currency basket without its own central bank, the "global
monetary stance" would continue to be a "weighted average" of the stances of the major
economies. Although IMF decisions on SDR allocations and cancellations could potentially
influence the stance, the complex and politically-charged decision making process on SDR
allocations may not be suitable for conducting an efficient monetary policy on a global scale.
In order to facilitate the transition to an SDR-based system, it may in any case be necessary
to set up at the IMF SDR-denominated reserve accounts where members could deposit their
currency reserves and obtain in exchange SDR deposits, as suggested by Governor Zhou.
This closely resembles the idea of a "Substitution account", which has a long history in
international monetary reform negotiations in which I was personally involved (Micossi and
Saccomanni, 1981). In the broader context of Governor Zhou's proposal, this could be seen
as a way of smoothing the transition to an SDR-based system, avoiding the uncertainty and
potential currency instability associated to the shift in the composition of global reserves
(Kenen, 2010).
The rationale for establishing a "Substitution account" is twofold. First, it would allow
countries to rebalance their reserve composition through off-market transactions, thus
avoiding undesirable exchange rate effects of the liquidation of large amounts of dollar
reserves. Second, it would also be possible to share or shift the exchange rate risk from the
original holders of dollar reserves to other parties. This second result, however, would
depend on the specific technical arrangements.4
Clearly, the financial implications of the alternative risk-sharing arrangements would be very
different, and would depend crucially on how exchange rates are expected to move after the
reserve transfer. The negotiation of any arrangement of this kind should therefore
presumably be part of a more general agreement on a reform of the international monetary
system. To the extent that such a reform would remove the underlying structural roots of the
dollar's weakness, it could also help make the exchange rate risk more acceptable (see
Williamson 2009; Kenen 2010).
4. The G20 reform process
A crucial test of the commitment of policy-makers in the major countries to address the
weaknesses of the existing global monetary and financial system and to set the global
economy on a sustainable growth path will be the outcome of the ongoing efforts to
rebalance global demand through enhanced policy coordination. This effort is currently
centered around the so-called "Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth"
launched by the G20 last year in Pittsburgh (Saccomanni, 2010). It envisages the
identification by each G20 country of detailed policy measures aimed at achieving the agreed
common objectives, with a mutual assessment process, assisted by the IMF, where the
adequacy, consistency and effective implementation of those measures will have to be
evaluated.
The choice of the G20 as the leading forum for cooperation was dictated by the need to
strengthen the legitimacy of the process, recognising that a global readjustment could not be
treated as a bilateral affair between a few major countries - no matter how big - or that it
could be left to the interplay of foreign exchange markets. Every effort must be made to
ensure that the G20 process is successful. A failure would have serious implications for the
growth prospects of the world economy and might set in motion renewed tensions in the
global financial system and in exchange rate relationships.
Europe is deeply committed to play its role in the adjustment process. Although individual
countries within the euro area have non-negligible surpluses or deficits, the area as a whole
runs an approximate balance and it has been able to absorb the impact of a dollar
depreciation of 45 percent vis-à-vis the euro between early 2002 and mid-2008, only partially
compensated by the dollar appreciation recorded since then. Since the crisis, the need to
take measures to deal with its internal imbalances and to restore growth and competitiveness
of its members has become an important policy priority for the European Union, as reflected
in the EU 2020 Economic Program recently presented by the European Commission. A firm
commitment has been undertaken at the highest political level to take "determined and
coordinated action to safeguard financial stability in the euro area as a whole".
In the G20 strategy, the process of rebalancing and sustaining global growth is expected to
be supported by complementary efforts to liberalise the trade system and to strengthen
financial regulation.
A commitment to maintain an open multilateral trading system has been strongly reaffirmed
in every G20 statement, together with the objective of reaching "a successful conclusion of
the WTO's Doha Development Agenda with an ambitious and balanced outcome". But
progress in this delicate area has been mixed. Anecdotal evidence provides confirmation of
the fact that "low intensity protectionism" is spreading. Over 450 protectionist measures have
been introduced last year by G20 members, both industrial and emerging countries, of which
one-third against China. The Doha negotiations, moreover, continue to be hampered by
disagreements among industrial and emerging countries and that the practice of bilateral and
regional trade agreements continues to pose a threat for the multilateral nature of the world's
trading system.
Work on reforming the financial regulatory system is well under way under the aegis of the
Financial Stability Board (FSB). The main areas of this critical work include:

strengthening the global capital framework (by building stronger buffers into the
financial system, covering capital, liquidity and provisioning);

making global liquidity more robust (by introducing new minimum liquidity standards
and a structural ratio to address liquidity mismatches);

reducing the moral hazard posed by systemically important institutions (by
envisaging specific additional capital, liquidity and prudential requirements to reduce
the complexity of group structures);

strengthening accounting standards (with the objective of convergence,
transparency and the mitigation of pro-cyclicality);

expanding oversight of the financial system (to ensure that all systemically important
activity - such as that of the hedge funds and credit rating agencies - is subjected to
appropriate oversight and regulation);

strengthening the robustness of the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market
(strengthening capital requirements and incentives, moving to central counterparties
or organized exchanges);
The enormous complexity of the technical issues at stake, the strength of conflicting vested
interests and the expanded number of participants in the negotiations explain why the
process of financial reform is still underway more than two years after the outbreak of the
crisis. Nevertheless, a high degree of consensus has been reached on the main components
of the reform and it seems unlikely at this stage that the process will be stalled.
* * *
The outline of a new international monetary system is being drafted within the G20 and in the
broad fora of the academic community of the public opinion. The main pillars of a new
system - a stability oriented anchor for macroeconomic policies; an open multilateral trading
system; a more resilient and risk-averse regulatory regime; a reserve regime based on a
multilateral asset - are in different stages of construction. The world economy shows signs of
recovery but it is essential that the pace of reform is not slowed down. It is imperative to
reduce significantly the risk for the world economy of a devastating crisis such as the one we
have just experienced. This requires to tackle the potential sources of instability that lie in our
very imperfect international monetary arrangements.
References
Alessandrini, P. and M. Fratianni (2009), "Dominant currencies, Special Drawing Rights and
World
supranational bank money", Economics, Vol. 10, No. 4, Oct./Dec.
Bergsten, C.F. (2009), "The dollar and the deficits", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No. 6,
November/December.
Cooper, R. (2009), "The future of the dollar", Peterson Institute for International Economics,
Policy Brief PB09-21, September, http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb09-21.pdf.
Eichengreen, B. (2009) "The dollar dilemma", Foreign Affairs, Vol. 88, No.5, Sept./Oct.
Greenwald, B. and J. Stiglitz (2008), "A modest proposal for international monetary reform",
International Economic Association Meeting, Istanbul, June,
http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/ipd/pub/Modest.Proposal.COMBINED.pdf.
Kenen, P. (2010), "The substitution account as a first step toward reform of the international
monetary system", Peterson Institute for International Economics, Policy Brief PB10-6,
March, http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb10-06.pdf.
Mateos y Lago, I., R. Duttagupta and R. Goyal (2009), "The debate on the international
monetary system", IMF Staff Position Note, SPN/09/26, November,
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2009/spn0926.pdf.
Micossi, S. and F. Saccomanni (1981), "The substitution account: The problem, the
techniques and the politics", BNL Quarterly Review, No. 137, Nov.-Dec.
Padoa-Schioppa, T. (2010), "The ghost of Bancor: the economic crisis and global monetary
disorder", speech at a Conference organized by the Foundation International Triffin,
http://www.notre-europe.eu/uploads