Time: 10:00am - 3:00pm
Professor Rosa Lastra, Centre for Commercial Law Studies, convened an elite group of experts drawn from the fields of economics & finance, financial law and international trade law to discuss the future of the international monetary and financial system, from the perspective of its relationship with the international trading system, in particular the lessons from the institutional architecture of WTO, its global rules on trade and its dispute settlement system.
The meeting, which followed a Symposium organised by Professor John Jackson, widely regarded as the father of international trade law and one of the fathers of WTO, Professor Thomas Cottier and Professor Lastra, aimed to establish a meaningful dialogue between law and economics on the one hand, and international trade and international finance on the other hand. The recent address by Pascal Lamy: "We need an international monetary system which facilitates international trade"provides interesting reflections.
The future of global finance as we know it is at stake. We either retrench back to national markets or establish an appropriate rule-based system for international finance. Whether a WTO-like solution in finance would do better at playing the 'Sentinel' role (in the words of Ross Levine) than the current FSB 'peer review' exercises is an issue which must be discussed. And the role of the IMF should bereassessed.