Braking the Banks

The world economy is showing signs of recovery, stock markets are soaring and bankers are again awarding themselves big bonuses. But one year after the financial conflagration that devastated Wall Street and burned financial institutions around the globe, the main firefighters — central bankers, market regulators and government policymakers — continue to struggle with a central question: How do we prevent it from happening again?

Some of the answers are technical. Regulatory oversight, almost everyone agrees, needs to be beefed up. There's also an emerging consensus on the need for banks to hold more capital and for their appetite for risk to be curtailed. But bigger issues are at stake too, ones that are more political and philosophical in nature: Should any bank be too big to fail? What should be done with financial activities that seem purely speculative and of questionable social use? How can the short-term, get-rich-quick mentality that drove so much market activity before the crash — and inflated those bonuses — be curbed? Is there a place for morality in the world of finance? (See the financial crisis after one year.)

After months of behind-the-scenes debate, these issues will be the elephants in the room at the G-20 summit meeting of major economic powers due to take place in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Sept. 24-25. Diplomats and analysts say that a growing convergence among nations on the technical details surrounding greater industry oversight may paper over a divisive philosophical gulf. The U.S. and Britain, with their instinctive support and dependence on free-market finance, are increasingly at odds with France and Germany, who are more skeptical about the benefits of unfettered capitalism and hope to win votes at home by controlling its excesses. But even among native English speakers, there's an intriguing debate taking place about the limits of finance, spearheaded by Adair Turner, the chairman of Britain's market regulator, the Financial Services Authority. To the dismay of some in the City of London, he is arguing forcefully that the financial sector in Britain has "swollen beyond its socially useful size."

None of this is simply academic theorizing. One year on, public fury about the massive banking bailouts continues to drive calls for greater oversight and regulation. Much of the outrage is directed at bankers who earned huge bonuses by taking outsized risks with complex financial instruments, only to walk away scot-free when their bets went awry, plunging the world into crisis. Bonuses are just one aspect of the larger issue of moral hazard that has been raised over the past year, as governments and central banks have spent tens of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to rescue financial institutions whose recklessness in the name of short-term profiteering is at the root of the trouble. For all the recent signs of improvement, the financial situation is still far from normal. Some huge financial institutions, from AIG to Royal Bank of Scotland, remain on government life support. Jürgen Stark, a board member of the European Central Bank (ECB), recently estimated that financial institutions operating in Europe alone are facing total losses of around $650 billion between 2007 and 2010 — and have so far written down less than half of that amount in their books. "There is no room for complacency," he said, warning that extraordinary government and central-bank bailout measures "cannot be sustained forever."

As world leaders take stock in Pittsburgh, there'll be a plethora of issues on the table aimed at making the world's finances more stable, transparent and resilient. Here's TIME's guide to four of the initiatives deemed most important to this effort.

Reining in the Banks At the World Economic Forum in Davos last January, some participants advocated radical measures to rein in banks, including regulating their operations so heavily that they would turn into low-risk utilities. No, said Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, that wouldn't solve the problem. What's needed, he argued, "are air bags, cushions and shock absorbers." Trichet has now detailed what he means. On Sept. 6, a group of central-bank governors and regulators from 27 countries that is chaired by Trichet published specific proposals that he said would "set new standards for banking supervision and regulation at a global level."

The measures would require banks to boost their capital base and put strict limits on the extent to which they would be able to leverage their balance sheets. They would also require banks to keep a portion of the loans they sell as asset-backed securities to ensure that they have a stake in what happens to those loans. Some regulators including Britain's Turner are calling for big financial institutions to have "living wills" that would enable their activities to be wound up in an orderly manner in the event they failed, thus avoiding the sort of panic caused by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers a year ago.

See pictures of the global financial crisis.