#WTO

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.

To be sure, this globalized and increasingly financialized construct was imperfect even for the hegemonic states and systemic financial companies in whose interests it worked the best.  As Rana Foroohar pointed out last week, it was premised on the optimistic “end of history” reasoning that expected an interdependent world to be all-for one and one-for-all.  Quite simply, if you must go through someone else’s space to get where you want to go, then you are more likely to abide by the rules applicable in that space to ensure you get there.  Over time, this creates a macrofinancial system in which currencies, payments, assets, and risks moved with few speedbumps from one end of the earth to the other.  Even where rules might slow all of this down, safe-haven states constructed high-price bypasses.  This, …