China Won't Be Riding to the Rescue

In the years after the Second World War, the bomb-ravaged capitals of Europe swarmed with American businessmen, bankers and Federal Reserve officials, combing the ruins for places to stick investments, loans and infrastructure funds.

In the process, they built both productive European economies that repaid their investments in dollars and traded across the Atlantic, and a consumer market that bought American products (and took American loans to buy them), creating the central plank of what we call the postwar order.