The rails we rely on every day to tap in-store or send money online often run through Dublin, but ultimately connect back to New York or California. Photograph: Getty Images
We tend to think of money as value - the cash in our wallet, the balance displayed on a banking app. But money is both instrument and infrastructure: it’s not only value, in other words, but the rail that moves it from place to place.
The form money takes carries symbolic weight, but the real power lies in who manages it, and in who decides when and where it can flow.
In a tumultuous world, control of financial infrastructure is a powerful geopolitical weapon.
Countries freeze assets to bend others to their will. They control access to payments systems. They extend debt or credit with strings attached, reshaping domestic policies. And they wield sanctions to disconnect their adversaries from the global grid.
The League of Nations weaponised finance to suppress Mussolini
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