Until the financial crises of the 1990s and the 2008-09 financial crisis, trade finance had been taken for granted. But these periods of crisis created distortions in the trade finance market which made policy interventions necessary.Moreover, at the “low end” of the market, in the poorest countries, lack of access to trade finance is largely a structural problem. This problem has been worsened by the 2009 financial crisis, as the international banking system isrestructuring —and tends to assume less risk than before.This Brève describes efforts by the international community to partly alleviate this problem.
