It is tempting to conclude that giving more resources to the likes of the IMF can cure the current crisis, but the problem is larger than one of underresourced institutions unable to enact otherwise effective policy. The last century's economic architecture was built on the notion of the economy as an equilibrium system, but amid today's economic storms the global economy is revealing itself to be something quite different, a dynamic system in which equilibrium is an illusion. Given this reality, our institutions are as obsolete as the defenses of the Maginot Line -- their policy guns are pointed in the wrong direction.

A new Bretton Woods is in our future, a moment when chastened global leaders will commit to building a new institutional order. But it will take another, larger economic crisis before the collective will to do so is found. In the meantime, we must immediately undertake another equally important task: We need to create a global economic observatory, an entity capable of collecting and digesting the data needed to truly understand the global economy in all its shifting complexity.

In theory, the IMF and World Bank already perform this task. In fact, what they collect is too narrow, too slow to get published, and their data-collection activities are subordinate to their policymaking and implementation missions. Imagine instead an institution with the analytic resources of Wall Street players, the reach of Google, and the openness of Wikipedia. Such an observatory would leverage the capacities of cyberspace to become a global (and cost-effective) clearinghouse for economic information. Its scope would extend far beyond the data collected by established entities today, for example probing deep into the world's illicit economies and exploring the market implications of rapidly spreading social media. And unlike those institutions, it would serve a purely informational role with no policy responsibilities.

Above all, this economic observatory would be open and independent, inviting the participation of crowds and encouraging the broadest possible research access to its data in the service of rethinking our global economic architecture. Funding is less of a hurdle than one might think. Such an observatory could be operated on a fraction of the 342 million-euro annual budget of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Moreover, its smaller budget would provide the flexibility required to preserve both the appearance and actuality of independence. It might even be possible to crowdsource the bulk of its budget over the Internet.

The global economy has reached such complexity and scale that it qualifies as a tectonic force alongside those of nature. If anything, we know more about weather systems and the like than we know about the global econosphere, and our weather forecasting is unquestionably better than our economic forecasting. It is time to embark on a systematic process of gathering the economic ground truth required to truly understand the global economy in all its shifting complexity. Then maybe next time we'll see it coming.

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