“Kindleberger saw this not as dumb policy error, but, according to his biographer, the economist Perry Mehrling, as central bankers being overwhelmed and without a leader among them to stand up and support the international monetary system to guarantee that cash and credit could keep moving. As Kindleberger wrote in 1973: “The world economic system was unstable unless some country stabilised it, as Britain had done in the nineteenth century and up to 1913. In 1929, the British couldn’t and the United States wouldn’t.” The old world had died and the new hadn’t yet been born, to paraphrase another great economist.”
