The Global Financial Crisis: Some attributes and responses

[Extract] In this special issue of Accounting & Finance (hereafter, referred to as the ‘GFC Special Issue’), we showcase some of the contributions presented at a conference on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) held in November 2009 at the Joondalup Resort in Perth, Western Australia, sponsored by Edith Cowan University, the ARC Funded Financial Integrity Research Network (FIRN) and the Perth Convention Bureau. The theme of the conference was ‘Financial Crises, Causes, Characteristics and Effects’, and a wide variety of papers addressing issues relating to this theme were presented. Six of these papers are presented in this issue (plus a further contributed paper). They range in topics from the implications of the GFC for accounting standards and accounting convergence; the subject of two papers – one by Stevenson and the other by Mala and Chand; before moving to a greater focus on the impacts of the crisis on individual markets and instruments. Larkin et al. examine the impact of the crisis on options markets, whilst Do et al. (in a contributed paper) examine the impact of the short-selling ban, and Wee and Yang examine some of the market microstructure impacts of the crisis. The focus then proceeds to the more theoretical issue of the role of asymmetric information in financial markets and its contribution to the pricing of risk and the size of risk premiums in a paper by He and Shi. Finally, regulatory issues and the impact of Basel Accord penalties and the use of Value at Risk (VaR) as a risk metric are considered by Da-Veiga et al. There can be no argument that the GFC was truly global and impacted across all markets, debt, equity and derivatives across the globe, to varying degrees.