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On the eve of the COVID-19 crisis, the global financial safety net (GFSN) boasted more liquidity resources than at any other point in history. As the global economy entered a freefall due to the economic effects of the pandemic and efforts to stop the spread of COVID-19, both casual observers and experts were convinced that policy-makers had a broader range of institutions to draw on for international liquidity support than during the global financial crisis of 2008/9. Yet, increased resources of additional and reformed multilateral institutions for emergency liquidity have been surprisingly underutilized during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to recently updated estimates from a new interactive database compiled by the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and the Global Development Policy Center at Boston University, in 2018, the financing available from the fledgling GFSN had reached at least USD 3.5 trillion, or 4 percent of global GDP (Mühlich et al. 2020). Today, the IMF with its current one trillion lending volume is by far not the only actor to provide emergency liquidity. Further to the IMF, several regional financial arrangements (RFA) have been set up to provide crisis finance between neighboring countries or peers. Further, bilateral currency swaps between central banks of substantial volume have become an essential element of the GFSN landscape. While the level of support is larger than just a few decades ago, it is still less than one percent of total financial assets (FSB 2020).