Why haven't politicians learned from the financial crisis? | Mohamed El-Erian

Advanced economies responded with temporary measures when they needed broader, longer-term solutions

Ten years ago this month, the French bank BNP Paribas decided to limit investors' access to the money they had deposited in three funds. It was the first loud signal of the financial stress that would, a year later, send the global economy into a tailspin. Yet the massive economic and financial dislocations that would come to a boil in late 2008 and continue through early 2009 - which brought the world to the brink of a devastating multi-year depression - took policymakers in advanced economies completely by surprise. They had clearly not paid enough attention to the lessons of crises in the emerging world.

Anyone who has experienced or studied developing-country financial crises will be painfully aware of their defining features. For starters, as the late Ri1/4diger Dornbusch argued, financial crises can take a long time to develop, but once they erupt, they tend to spread rapidly, widely, violently and (seemingly) indiscriminately.

Related: A decade after the financial meltdown, its underlying problems haven't been fixed