When talking about the international financial architecture, participants in Vienna agreed that 2009 would undoubtedly enter the textbooks as the year dominated by the biggest financial crisis seen in decades. Certainly 2009 would also be remembered as a year in which strong and internationally coordinated policy efforts were undertaken to shield financial markets, the real economy, and banking sectors around the globe from the most adverse effects of the global downturn. International cooperation – in particular in the framework of the EU, the G-20, and the IMF – was central to financially supporting banks and sovereign states.Participants also felt that instead of seeing the 2000’s as deflationary, it seemed likely that they would be viewed as the beginning of a new inflation. Two features were seen as making this outcome more likely: first, the large public sector deficits that are the inevitable historical consequence of states’ trying to mop up the fallout of financial sector failures; and second, a heightened intellectual confusion around the making of monetary policy. In just the same way as the Great Depression destroyed the credibility of the Gold Standard, the Lehman crash had ended the attractions of a simple inflation target.