Leaders of the G7 nations are increasingly talking about and threatening self-harm, a tendency against which their citizens have to intervene and prevent (economic) suicide attempts.
Over the last several days, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen lamented that her own sanctions were undermining her own currency, the U.S. dollar; and one of her predecessors, Larry Summers, moaned about how “lonely it is being on the right side of history.” On April 17, Ms. Yellen’s friend and European Central Bank head Christine Lagarde repeated Yellen’s thoughts about self-harm when speaking to the New York Council on Foreign Relations. “We are witnessing a fragmentation of the global economy into competing blocs,” Lagarde said sadly, with “more instability” and “more multipolarity as geopolitical tensions continue to mount.” She talked about many countries avoiding Western payment systems and currencies, sometimes “because of the use of financial sanctions in the past decade.”
