Portal Systems science

The global financial system is the worldwide framework of legal agreements, institutions, and both formal and informal economic action that together facilitate international flows of financial capital for purposes of investment and trade financing. Since emerging in the late 19th century during the first modern wave of economic globalization, its evolution is marked by the establishment of central banks, multilateral treaties, and intergovernmental organizations aimed at improving the transparency, regulation, and effectiveness of international markets. In the late 1800s, world migration and communication technology facilitated unprecedented growth in international trade and investment. At the onset of World War I, trade contracted as foreign exchange markets became paralyzed by money market illiquidity. Countries sought to defend against external shocks with protectionist policies and trade virtually halted by 1933, worsening the effects of the global Great Depression until a series of reciprocal trade agreements slowly reduced tariffs worldwide. Efforts to revamp the international monetary system after World War II improved exchange rate stability, fostering record growth in global finance.

A series of currency devaluations and oil crises in the 1970s led most countries to float their currencies. The world economy became increasingly financially integrated in the 1980s and 1990s due to capital account liberalization and financial deregulation. A series of financial crises in Europe, Asia, and Latin America followed with contagious effects due to greater exposure to volatile capital flows. The global financial crisis, which originated in the United States in 2007, quickly propagated among other nations and is recognized as the catalyst for the worldwide Great Recession. A market adjustment to Greece's noncompliance with its monetary union in 2009 ignited a sovereign debt crisis among European nations known as the Eurozone crisis. The history of international finance shows a U-shaped pattern in international capital flows: high prior to 1914 and after 1989, but lower in between. The volatility of capital flows has been greater since the 1970s than in previous periods. (Full article...)

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• Wikiproject Systems
• WikiProject Science
• WikiProject Philosophy
• WikiProject History of Science

Debora Hammond (born 1951) is an American historian of science, former Provost and Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies of the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at the Sonoma State University. She is known as author of the 2003 book The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory, and as 2005–06 President of International Society for the Systems Sciences. (Full article...)

• ... * then a science of complexity,
• ... * Beginning at the base, with a science of description,
• ... that the anthropologist, linguist, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson's most noted writings are Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) and Mind and Nature (1980).
• ... * continuing vertically with a science of design,