We review the role the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played over the past several decades in managing financial crises and suggest possible areas for reform. We examine the background to the 2008–2009 global financial crisis and analyze many of its implications, particularly the sharp increase in the burden of public debt that was a consequence of the crisis, and identify this as a source of systemic risk. We argue that our current financial system has a number of vulnerabilities that pose a major threat to financial stability and economic prosperity and could, in a crisis, interact in highly destabilizing ways with other aspects of our governance system. The UN Charter clearly introduced the concept of economic and social development as a key responsibility of the international community, and two of the leading UN agencies, the IMF and the World Bank, are very much at the center of implementing the UN’s mandate in this area. We focus on the IMF because of the central role the organization plays in the management of the global monetary system, a system whose weaknesses were dramatically revealed during the 2008–2009 financial crisis. We present several proposals for reforms aimed at improving the global financial architecture.