Event Summary
José Viñals, financial counsellor and director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), presented the October 2015 Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR) at the Peterson Institute for International Economics on October 21, 2015. Olivier Blanchard, the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Institute and former chief economist of the IMF, chaired the event and provided additional insights on the conclusions of the GFSR.
Viñals discussed how the outlook for financial stability has improved in advanced economies, while risks continue to rotate toward emerging markets, which now play a greater role in the world economy. In this context, Viñals also discussed how a triad of challenges confronting policymakers—managing vulnerabilities in emerging markets, tackling crisis legacies in advanced economies, and addressing fragilities in global financial markets—calls for an urgent policy upgrade to reach a successful normalization of monetary and financial conditions and to anchor financial stability in the medium term.
As financial counsellor and director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the IMF, Viñals is a member of the Financial Stability Board. A former deputy governor at the Central Bank of Spain, he has also held the positions of chairman of the European Central Bank International Relations Committee and chairman of Spain’s Deposit Guarantee Funds. In addition, he has been a member of the Bank for International Settlements Committee on the Global Financial System, the European Central Bank Monetary Policy Committee, and the high-level group appointed by the president of the European Commission to examine economic challenges in the European Union.
Blanchard joined the Institute as the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow on October 1 this year. Before joining the Institute, he was the economic counsellor and director of the Research Department of the IMF, a position he held since 2008. He taught at Harvard University from 1977 to 1982, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1982 to 2003. He was chair of the MIT economics department from 1998 to 2003. He remains the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT.