This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 5th, 2018. I'm

Caleb Brown. How has banking changed since the financial crisis? Is the system more secure even as new risks have

emerged? Tobias Adrian is the financial counselor and director of the monetary and

capital markets department at the International Monetary Fund.

We spoke during the Cato Institute's monetary conference last month.

For the help of our listeners, what does the IMF do exactly?

The IMF is a very broad membership with 189 members. The US is actually the

member with the largest quota in the fund. A quota is sort of the capital of the IMF. The IMF has

lending capacity that is around a trillion dollars. So one of the things that the

AMF is doing is to lend to countries when they're in distress.

When they can no longer get funding anywhere else in the world, they turn to the IMF. The IMF comes in with a program.

The program means that we lend, but it's conditional on turning around the economy,

condition on changing economic policy.

So this is one of three things that the fund is doing.

The other two things are surveillance,

so we look at all our member countries in terms of economic policy and in terms of

financial stability at regular intervals. So these broad economic assessments are done either every year or every two years depending on the size of the economy.

And then my department, which is the monetary and capital markets department, does financial sector assessment programs.

So these are very deep assessments of the financial stability policies in the membership.

The US one was last done in 2015 and the next one is going to be

started next year. The third thing that the fund is doing is technical

assistance. This is particularly for merger markets in low

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