Investors from Manila to Munich to Manhattan were aghast at the spectacle of market contagion during August’s global stock-price meltdown—all those markets and many more took a heavy hit. What’s an investor to do when a bursting bubble in China can wipe trillions of dollars from the value of assets on every continent?
It’s a good question, and it has an answer: Celebrate. Not that a plunge in net worth makes anyone want to raise a glass (a bottle, maybe). But the worldwide rout is evidence of an emerging financial order that is, on the whole, a good thing. Here’s how to think about it.
We increasingly live in one big capitalist world. Obviously some countries aren’t there yet, and a few don’t want to be. National economies don’t move in sync and probably never will. That’s not what matters most. What counts is that the world’s capital is more willing and able than ever to go anywhere, moving around the globe as comfortably as Carlos Ghosn or Beyoncé. A given investor’s mutual fund money at a given moment might plausibly be in any or all of the world’s stock markets.
The evidence is striking. Global foreign-exchange trading is around $5 trillion a day. Worldwide trading in goods and services is about 1% of that amount. In other words, all that money on the move is 1% trade, 99% finance—investors operating globally.