An expert panel discussed possible policy solutions to the global financial crisis Tuesday night at NYU. CFR.org contributing writer Julie Ginsberg filed this report from the event.

Last night, three economic experts gave recommendations for steps Barack Obama’s administration should take to revive the global financial system. The overarching message of the event, the first of three talks jointly hosted by CFR, the Economist, and New York University’s Stern School of Business, was that economies of every size are in this crisis together and need to coordinate broadly to resolve it.

The panelists—the Economist’s U.S. Economics Editor Greg Ip, CFR Fellow for Geoeconomics Brad Setser, and Stern’s Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance Roy C. Smith—agreed that the first order of business was establishing a unified approach to financial rescue efforts worldwide. That doesn’t mean scrapping the existing international financial regulatory system and starting from scratch, said Ip. Rather, the new system should build on the existing framework to improve regulatory activities and ensure that countries keep each other afloat, he said.

Within such a framework, Ip said, governments would have the “formal, legal authority to take over any firm that’s struggling, pay off creditors, and wind the company down.” Such regulations would standardize conditions for receiving government funds and restore consumer and corporate trust that panelists said was shaken in 2008 when the U.S. government bailed out the investment bank Bear Stearns but let another, Lehman Brothers, go bankrupt. Smith said the volatile reaction to recent financial uncertainty was due in part to people not “getting a clear picture of what the game plan is.”

Setser stressed the need for policies that require large U.S. lending institutions to have enough cash on hand to prevent the need for large-scale taxpayer-funded bailouts in the future. But that might cost more than the government’s current $700 billion package, he said, adding that decisions about whether or not to add more funds should be made quickly once the new president takes office.

Liquidity also has to be available on a global scale—that’s where international institutions and new regulations come in. “The challenge is to prevent the contraction of credit to the emerging world’s net borrowers,” Setser said. The worst-case scenario, he said, would be a situation in which the oil price fell to $30 per barrel, commodity prices also dropped, and oil-dependent and debtor countries found themselves unable to pay off international debts.

Listen to the audio recording of the event here.