Financial Globalization and Monetary Policy
Financial globalization is a long-term process, very difficult to reverse and, most
importantly, in a continuous state of evolution. Bearing this in mind, the influence that
financial globalization has on monetary policy and the structure of its transmission
mechanism can prove to be a real challenge for central banks and their need for
control. This however does not mean that financial globalization is always a bad thing
from a central bank point of view, just that it alters the rules of the monetary policy
game and makes it much more complex.
The process of financial globalization is probably one of the most visible effects of
the decisions and economic architecture inspired by neoliberal principles and it is
characterized by a complex series of elements. Out of these, the most important are
the ones regarding changes in both public and private sector through easy access
to capital, which, more than ever, became a „global good” and the ones concerning
the process of integration in the banking system, which, in the broader context of
dereglementation, has become a catalyst for development with little or no obstruction
from national borders. Taking a complementary view on all these, Bădulescu (2007)
identifies three components of financial globalization: decompartimentation of
markets, financial dereglementation and de-intermediation. On the same subject,
Aglietta (1999) writes that financial globalization is associated with transformations
which have affected the functioning principles of finance and that these
transformations are closely connected with the liberalization of national financial
systems and international integration.
Financial globalization is, without any doubt, among the economic realities that have
dominated the world macroeconomic environment after the SecondWorldWar until
today. Formally enounced as one of the ten points of the Washington Consensus
(Williamson, 1989), a set of economic prescriptions which basically summarize the
neoliberal economic approach, and omnipresent in the economic policy promoted in
the last decades, the objective of financial globalization seems to have been
reached. However, one can argue that the economic effects have not been entirely
the ones hoped for. In a global society based on the profoundly human desire of
expansion, financial globalization is combining forces with financial
dereglementation and a high degree of financiarization, term used to describe the
process of translating different aspects of production and economic activity into
market-traded financial instruments, often very esoteric in nature. In this context, the
highly mobile and, due to leverage and derivative financial instruments, highly
expandable capital, has created the largest bubble in history, with effects on all
economic agents, from households to banks, private companies and sovereign
states. The overwhelming majority of the world's economies are part of a global
financial market which functions based on a cumulus of factors, most of them