Gowan

The Globalization Gamble: The Dollar-Wall
Street Regime and its Consequences.
By Peter Gowan
PART ONE: ‘CAPITAL MARKETS’, FINANCIAL SYSTEMS AND THE POST-WAR INTERNATIONAL
MONETARY SYSTEM
PART TWO: THE DOLLAR-WALL STREET REGIME
The 1990s have been the decade of globalisation. We see its effects everywhere: in economic, social and political life, around the world. Yet the more all-pervasive are globalisation’s effects, the more elusive is the animal itself. An enormous outpouring of academic literature has failed to provide an agreed view of its physionomy or its location and some reputable academics of Right and Left even question its very existence. Others, notably Anglo-American journalists and politicians, insist it is a mighty beast which savages all who fail to respect its needs. They assure us that its gaze, ‘blank and pitiless as the sun’, has turned upon the Soviet Model, the Third World Import-Substitution
Development Model, the European Social Model, the East Asian Development Model, bringing them all to their knees. For these pundits, globalisation is the bearer of a new planetary civilisation, a single market-place, a risk society, a world beyond the security of states, an unstoppable, quasi-natural force of global transformation.
Yet, as the East Asian crisis turned into a global international financial scare, some who might be thought to be deep inside the belly of this beast, the big operators on the ‘global financial markets’, wondered whether globalisation might be in its death agony. At the start of 1998, Joe Quinlan, senior analyst for the American investment bank
Morgan Stanley, raised the possibility that globalisation may be coming to an end. He noted that “globalisation has been the decisive economic event of this decade” and stressed that “no one has reaped more benefits from globalisation than the United States and Corporate America....The greater the velocity and mobility of global capital, the more capital available to