The program committee was formed by Michael Bordo (Rutgers University, University of Cambridge and NBER) and Hans-Joachim Voth (CREI, UPF and CEPR). The conference brought together practitioners from the IMF and central banks, and from all parts of academia. The key benefit was a two-way exchange between the two groups. With dangerous financial imbalances in the world financial system, the practitioners uniformly described as valuable the historical depth of the programme, giving them a better sense of the full range of possible outcomes of crises and their origins. Academics benefitted from insights into the key questions that policymakers are asking today, especially in terms of the transmission mechanism for financial crises and the role of sovereign debt.