Editorial 53

Abstract

Ola Financiera set sail in troubled waters, with its first issue, coinciding with the fall of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and the beginning of a crisis at the heart of capitalism comparable only with the crash of 1929, the trigger for the Great Depression. Since then, several authors in Ola Financiera have taken on the task of understanding the changing directions and characteristics of today's capitalism, in its entirety and in its most important component parts. For several of these authors, finance is closely linked to the military, the historical to the present, and the connection between the Great Depression and World War II has been the shadow haunting the world in the post-Lehman period. At the end of February, this shadow explodes into the light in the form of fire, and in an instant, the ball is in the air, as suggested by the always provocative "The World Ahead" issue of The Economist, with the ball understood as the destiny of humanity.

This issue of www.olafinanciera.unam.mx comes at a historical moment comparable only in its magnitude with the Second World War. Fortunately, in the first article, Cyrus Bina, for years a contributor to Ola Financiera, offers a perspective far from the conventional, but with great analytical merit, and at the right time to analyze the probability of the sudden fall of the U.S. empire.  But this number does not only look forward, but also towards the past in the present.

In both world wars of the last century, the monetary standard fell hand in hand with peace, revealing the close connection —often out of sight and mind in moments of calm— between the global financial architecture and the global peace order.  How these two elements interact has been a terrain of great dispute and debate for centuries, and this issue welcomes two articles of analysis, one by another longtime contributor to Ola Financiera, Tsuyoshi Yasuhara, on the changing global monetary standard; and the other, on the Bretton Woods system, whose fall marks the historic watershed towards financial globalization. 

Two articles are also presented that can be considered as the state of affairs just before another system change. On the one hand, Francisco Vidal offers a focus on the concentration of political and economic powers in Mexico, while on the other, a broader perspective is taken to analyze what the current system and how it operates in Latin America today. If there is one clear lesson from history, it is that once the fuse of war is lit, everything becomes highly volatile and unpredictable.  The direction the world will take in the coming years will undoubtedly be the subject of deep debate. This issue is offered as a key to reading the present, an invitation to understand the environment that surrounds us, as it is now inevitably transformed forever.