"...The first lesson to draw from the crisis is that leaving markets to regulate themselves is both ineffectual and costly. Bailing out financial institutions has already run into trillions of dollars, and despite unprecedented fiscal and monetary responses, the global economy experienced its first contraction since the Great Depression. An estimated 10 per cent of global output was lost between 2008 and 2010, and tens of millions of jobs were destroyed; according to estimates by the International Labour Organization (ILO), 200 million people are currently unemployed worldwide. The impact was felt even in those communities that had seen few benefits during the boom years: due to the crisis, the number of people living in extreme poverty jumped by between 50 and 100 million..."

"...A second lesson is that when a large number of economies collapse so dramatically, there must have been underlying weaknesses and fragilities missed or ignored by policymakers prior to the crisis. No one doubts the creative impulse of market forces, but the private pursuit of short-term gain can sometimes result in insufficient productive investment and concentrate the rewards with the favoured few. The risks are particularly pronounced when financial markets detach themselves from the real economy, tying wealth creation to the rapid accumulation of debt and rising asset prices rather than to steady productivity improvements and increasing incomes, and channelling innovation to financial engineering rather than to technological progress. Such a growth strategy is likely to be neither stable nor fair..."