Ensure democratic and accountable global financial institutions The institutions that currently police the global financial system, in particular the international monetary fund (IMF), have failed spectacularly to the point of complicity in the banking crisis. While pushing poor countries to deregulate their financial markets, the IMF has colluded with the world’s big private banks to foster a spirit of gungho, risk-free financing that jeopardised not only the position of investors, but of entire national economies. The time has come to radically restructure both the IMF and the World Bank to make them democratically accountable bodies without a prescribed ideological agenda, and with independent financing and voting systems free from political bullying and corporate bias.