The report highlights three specific areas in which the global economy experienced systemic failures. While there are many more facets to the crisis, UNCTAD examines here some of those that it considers to be the core areas to be tackled immediately by international economic policy-makers because they can only be addressed through recognition of their multilateral dimensions. The report investigates three interrelated issues of importance to developed and developing countries alike, and proposes measures to address the systemic failures they have entailed: how the ideology of financial deregulation within and across nations allowed the build-up of pressures whose unwinding has damaged the credibility and functioning of the market-based models that have underpinned financial development throughout the world; how the growing role of large-scale financial investors on commodities futures markets has affected commodity price volatility and fed speculative bubbles; and the role of widespread currency speculation in exacerbating global imbalances and fuelling the current crisis in the absence of a cooperative international system to manage exchange rate fluctuations to the benefit of all nations.