Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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Although it seems firmly entrenched, the primacy that the dollar enjoys today is, in historical terms, a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the 1800s, America's economy was predominantly agrarian and inward looking. It was not until 1916, with Europe heavily weighed down by World War I (WW1), that the US economy overtook the British Empire to become the largest in the world.ssss1 Even then, the role the dollar played in global trade and investment was only roughly equivalent to that of sterling up until WW2 and the throbbing heart of international finance continued to be the City of London, whose banking fraternity looked down on their US counterparts as ‘unsophisticated kinsmen, too rich for their own good’.ssss1

While it may be tempting to draw a correlation between the growth of the US economy during and after WW2 and the rise in the dollar's global status, much as it is now speculated that China's economic growth will inevitably lead to the renminbi becoming the dominant global currency, this interpretation would be overly simplistic and inaccurate. If GDP size were the sole factor determining the relative global importance of a nation's currency, then both the euro and the renminbi would already be close to usurping the dollar – a prospect that remains distant today. Instead, the dollar's present dominance is rooted in historical circumstance and perpetuated through four pillars of the US system: the rule of law; international trade and macroeconomic policies; the deepest and most open financial markets in the world; and established capital markets infrastructure supporting the global financial system. All too often, this fourth pillar is overlooked by economists and policymakers. This is a serious oversight for, without a solid understanding and appreciation of the ‘plumbing’ of the global financial system, it is impossible to foresee the impact of market evolutions or to design effective financial policies. Before attempting to diagnose the problems of our current global financial order, let alone determining the feasibility – or even desirability – of any major changes to it, we must first understand how it came about and its structural underpinnings.