Financial Stability in International Law

In the current interdependent global economic system, measures adopted nationally by governments to safeguard financial stability sometimes produce cross-border spillovers. A question arises as to how international economic law shall treat states’ regulatory powers to tackle internal and external economic and financial threats. The goal of the research is to analyze (i) how international law distributes between different international subjects the social costs of global instability in the event of emergencies, and (ii) how regulatory powers are attributed in a situation of economic and financial interdependence. To do so, this essay sets out a law and economics theory that conceptualizes financial stability in international law as the result of a trade-off between three competing regulatory objectives: domestic stability, global stability, and financial integration. The way in which the interplay between these objectives is represented in law crucially influences the balance of rights and obligations in the formulation of national economic and financial policies, and the level of protection against economic threats. This essay argues that current international law is largely inefficient because it structures the protection of financial stability as a matter of the individual rights of each state, rather than a social problem of the international community.