In the light of the experience with the severe financial crises of the 1990s, the responsibility for financial stability has implicitly been assigned to public policy, overturning, in a sense, the dominant paradigm until then of regarding financial development, including stability, as a function best performed by the financial markets. This paper undertakes a critical examination of this assignment, its magnitude and quality, by questioning its analytical underpinnings. The paper examines the search for the appropriate international financial architecture as the virtuous approach to the assignment and concludes that the identification of international standards and codes for adoption by countries may be a suboptimal approach. On the other hand, establishment of an international bankruptcy mechanism holds promise of filling a major gap in the efforts to strengthen the international financial architecture.
