World's Central Banks Are at War

In popular histories of World War I, the outbreak of hostilities is portrayed as essentially inadvertent. Rather than resulting from the struggle for dominance between a rising power and its established rivals, the war was a byproduct of a series of misunderstandings. Today, the flashpoint may be currencies rather than the Balkans, but the danger -- of misunderstanding leading to escalation and retaliation -- is fundamentally the same.