Economic co-operation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has broadly followed John Maynard Keynes’s observation that it tends to be “unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable [and] temporary”, new research finds.

The international financial system is facing a “fourth turning point” and could return to a co-operative outcome or go the way of Europe after the First World War, say Michael Bordo and Catherine Schenk in the working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic