It is a pleasure to be back in Washington and to deliver this year’s Per Jacobsson Lecture. As a young man in the 1920s, Jacobsson worked in the Economic and Financial Section of the League of Nations Secretariat. There, he was actively involved in work on Europe’s financial reconstruction in the wake of the greatest shock that had hit the continent: the First World War. The outbreak of that conflict in 1914, which killed so many and injured even more, marked the end of the first era of globalisation. The unprecedented flows of trade that had characterised the global economy between the 1870s and the early 1900s ... (full story)