Handbook of Safeguarding Global Financial Stability

Preface

Although finance has been a cross-border business for centuries, there are many senses in which the world is becoming more globalized financially. To be sure, early banks carried out transactions to settle imbalances at international trade fairs in the Middle Ages, but the vast swath of society at that time lived untouched by or unconcerned with the financial world outside their village and certainly outside their region. Their world abounded with risks, yet these risks were largely of the type from which their ability to achieve any kind of protection was limited. Indeed, risk was a term that if understood at all would have very different connotations than it does today. Probabilistic thinking was not yet known, and fate or ‘God’s will’ ...