The authors wish to thank Stephen Pickford, Lorenzo Codogno and Alan Wheatley for offering helpful comments on the paper’s content. Jake Statham, Matthew Oxenford and Dominic Williams at Chatham House provided essential research and editing support. We would also like to thank the Nomura Foundation for its support. An early draft of the paper was presented at the Nomura Foundation’s Macro Economy Research Conference, ‘The Evolving Global Financial Order’, in November 2015. Thanks are due to discussants at the conference, in particular Donald Kohn and Masahiro Kawai. Any errors remain the responsibility of the authors.