If it is misleading to construct our image of financial globalization around the Sino-American trade balance, to imagine it as centered on US securitization with outsiders being “sucked in” misses the point too. In fact, the entire structure of international banking in the early twenty-first century was transatlantic. The new Wall Street was not geographically confined to the southern end of Manhattan. It was a North Atlantic system. The second node, detached from but integrally and inseparably connected to New York, was the City of London.17 In the nineteenth century, in the age of the gold
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