Establishing a stable financial system requires identifying and isolating the common factors of crises, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke said at the IMF's annual research conference in Washington, DC on Friday – adding that the 2008 crisis was best understood as a classic financial panic "transposed into the novel institutional context of the 21st century financial system".

"Like most crises, the recent episode had an identifiable trigger – in this case, the growing realization by market