Writing in 1986, Susan Strange described the extreme volatility of the financial sphere as “casino capitalism.”
While investment bankers made fortunes, risk and instability arose to dominate everyday experience: “The great difference,” Strange writes, “between an ordinary casino which you can go into or stay away from, and the global casino of high finance, is that in the latter we are all involuntarily engaged in the day’s play.”
By the mid-1980s, the continually rolling dice had disrupted the entire international system for the production and exchange of goods and services.
The United States retained the central role in economic governance that it had won with WWII, but its hegemony was now founded on the management of chaos.