Have tough lessons been learnt from the recent crisis?

Imbalances create vulnerability and increase instability. That is a lesson the global economy should have learned over the past two years, as both the economy and the financial system went through a painful and costly recession. What was once a source of strength often became a source of weakness. So, have the lessons been learned, and to what extent have the imbalances been corrected? The first of the imbalances to consider are those at the international level, between countries that persistently ran a trade deficit and those that ran a trade surplus – or in more simplistic terms betwee...