While it is impossible to safeguard the system fully, sound regulation and effective oversight could have prevented the crisis, or at least reduced its impact on millions of people’s livelihoods. The problem was that central banks, finance ministries, and multilateral organizations like the International Monetary Fund – the pillars of the global economy’s institutional framework – failed to grasp globalization’s emerging characteristics and effects, owing partly to the difficulty of discerning structural shifts in the huge mass of data now available.