The Collapse of the Global Financial Order and What’s to Come
The Great Depression’s role sparking the Second World War led the victors to create the Bretton Woods agreement establishing stable reserve assets under-girding a world prosperous and peaceful enough to prevent another conflagration. After 2008, the world reinforced another set of global norms, setting cross-border financial standards over the next fifteen years by newly empowered transnational financial agencies. Now, what was left of Bretton Woods is in ashes and national geopolitical interests will again dictate critical financial requirements. Although it’s of course possible that Russia’s devastating invasion will end without still more cataclysmic carnage, it has done irreparable damage to the largely frictionless cross-border finance on which it and its oligarchs relied. China should take a lesson.