Financial regulators perform inter alia a quality control function, as they search for recession-generating flaws in the financial system. Some groupings of regulations operate more or less independently to other groupings, as is the case when different agents – not necessarily different institutions – examining the same regulatory issues or monitor the same behaviours independently...

Banks use a mix of wholesale and deposit funds to finance lending. If a country is a net importer of wholesale funds, then a financial crisis in a foreign country can 'infect' the banking system by raising the cost of wholesale funds. Indeed, countries such as Australia imported a crisis through the wholesale funding market...

The sub-prime crisis shows that it is not enough for Australia to regulate its own financial system well, according to this paper. It is also in Australia’s interests to work towards forms of global coordination, global monitoring and global crisis response which lessen the frequency and duration of these financial shocks. Most of the obvious...