The rise of China dominated contemporary perceptions of early twenty-first-century globalization. And the axis of imbalance that attracted most attention was that between China and the United States. Worries about geopolitics, Larry Summers’s balance of financial terror, Ben Bernanke’s savings glut, all pointed the finger in that direction. But if we map not annual flows but cross-border banking claims, this gives further proof of how one-sided the Sino-American view of the buildup to the crisis was. The central axis of world finance was not Asian-American but Euro-American. Indeed, of the six
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