GEAB Special issue July

The global systemic crisis has spanned 12 years between its onset in 2008 and its conclusion in 2020, most of which correspond to the ‘decantation phase’ mentioned in the previous article. During that time, the LEAP team has kept an eye on many axes of transformation – governance, geopolitical configuration, economic models, the Middle East, energy sources, technology, society – and has been able to identify the most important ones. This has produced numerous anticipations and analyses that will continue to be the subject of retrospective historiographical studies. But in this issue, we had to choose, and have selected the theme that is undoubtedly most central to the whole global transition, namely the reform of the international monetary system.

If the financial shock of 2008 primarily questioned the solidity of the dollar as a pillar of this system, the entire planet has worked towards only one end since then: to resolve the paradoxical injunction to free itself from its dependence on the US currency while protecting the value of the immense dollar-denominated foreign exchange reserves accumulated in the coffers of central banks. It is understandable that this process took time: precisely 10 years between the first awareness of the issue of the centrality of the dollar in the crisis, as stated by LEAP in 2009 in its open letter to the G20 leaders in London,[1] and the official statement in exactly the same vein by Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England in August 2019,[2] which probably served to send the signal that the public financial intuitions were ready.