The [Bretton Woods] system didn’t consider the owner of money to be the only person with a say in what happened to it. According to the carefully crafted rules, the nations that created and guaranteed the value of money had rights to that money, too. They restricted the rights of money-owners in the interests of everybody else. At Bretton Woods, the allies – desperate to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the inter-war depression and the second world war – decided that, when it came to international trade, society’s rights trumped those of money-owners.
All this is hard to imagine for anyone who has only experienced the world since the 1980s, because the system now is so different. Money flows ceaselessly between countries, nosing out investment opportunities in China, Brazil, Russia or wherever. If a currency is overvalued, investors sense the weakness and gang up on it like sharks around a sickly whale. In times of global crisis, the money retreats into the safety of gold or US government bonds. In boom times, it pumps up share prices elsewhere in its restless quest for a good return. These waves of liquid capital have such power that they can wash away all but the strongest governments. The prolonged speculative attacks on the euro, the rouble or the pound, which have been such a feature of the past few decades, would have been impossible under the Bretton Woods system, which was specifically designed to stop them happening.( ... tālāk ... )
"Bullough predicts that the next big thing will be poor countries selling ambassadorships. If you become ambassador to the Court of St James for some tiny island that you've never even visited, you have diplomatic immunity. Or you can offshore your embryo, as some enterprising Chinese officials now do. The husband fertilises the wife's egg, and they implant it in a Japanese woman, who gives birth to their child in Japan. The child has a Japanese passport, a chunk of the family money is transferred to his Japanese account, and now the family has somewhere to flee to, just in case."
https://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-a
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