A decade has passed since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. To mitigate the financial shock from developing into a full-blown global depression, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan have pumped in a combined stimulus of more than US$13 trillion, and interest rates are kept at an all-time low of close to zero or even below zero.

Nevertheless, quantitative easing is not a sustainable solution, and despite firmer economic growth indicators last year, the global financial system is still in a frail state. In fact, the last 10 years saw the emergence of disturbing socio-economic trends, including a surging global debt to GDP ratio, extremely uneven wealth distribution, and most worryingly, a “global trust capital deficit”.

… Christopher H. Lim is a Senior Fellow and Tan Ming Hui is an Associate Research Fellow in the Office of the Executive Deputy Chairman at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Click here to view the full article