The New Geopolitics of Money and Democratic Issues

A new international financial architecture is emerging, characterized by the normalization of some forms of capital control and the rise of bilateral loans between central banks. The issues of diplomacy and financial stability are intertwined. If authoritarian states with centralized power and without independence of central banks naturally find their account in this new state of the world, the monetary and financial institutions of democratic countries must establish a new legitimacy for their interventions that affect financial relations with foreign countries. Central banks cannot act alone and it is necessary to explicitly coordinate their action with other aspects of economic and foreign policy. This is as much a question of policy effectiveness as of democratic legitimacy.