One way to deal with moral hazard would be to distinguish explicitly between two different risks facing each country: on the one hand idiosyncratic risk, created by national policies and country specific shocks; on the other hand, “systemic” risk stemming from aggregate liquidity shocks occurring on a broader – global or regional – scale. Countries would self insure against idiosyncratic risk by holding a sufficient amount of reserves. Protection against systemic risk would come from a multilateral mechanism for international liquidity provision. Of course, the distinction between idiosyncratic and systemic risk may be difficult and involves a broad degree of judgment. But two basic rules should be guiding future work on a multilateral safety net: (1) conditions for access should be specified ex ante; and (2) those conditions should be fully delinked from the situation of individual economies. Rather, they should depend on the state of the global economy and international financial markets. From the point of view of an individual country, access should be fully unconditional, once global conditions are met. A considerable amount of work is currently devoted to devise instruments of contingent capital for financial institutions in times of crisis. The same intellectual framework can be extended to liquidity. What is needed is contingent liquidity i.e. liquidity available to nations in times of aggregate shocks to the international financial system. This raises two questions: where would such liquidity come from? How could it be mobilized?

Regional arrangements Another approach would privilege regional arrangements either for pooling reserves or redistributing them though permanent swap agreements. Asian countries, especially, are working on and implementing progressively such schemes through the Chiang Mai initiative. It should be noted that regional pooling is efficient only when countries are facing asymmetric liquidity shocks within the region. Pooling brings no additional benefits when shocks occur on a global scale and all countries are hit simultaneously. Also, regional arrangements cannot avoid the moral hazard problem that all multilateral schemes are facing. Nevertheless, there seems to be considerable scope for regional arrangements to prosper in the future. First, they can act as useful complements to more global schemes and be articulated with (and supported by) IMF facilities. Second, one can expect regional financial integration to progress, especially in those parts of the world where huge pools of savings are available and currently intermediated through financial systems located outside the region. With deeper financial integration, the probability of significant portfolio shifts inside one region increases markedly, creating the potential for asymmetric liquidity shocks. The development of regional liquidity arrangements may appear very useful to underpin the development of regional financial markets. Stores of value One consequence of the crisis has been to cast doubts on the ability of some assets, up to now considered as riskless, to serve as reliable stores of value. The ability of the private sector to create “safe” assets through financial innovation has proved largely illusory (Caballero, 2009).