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Banks: Islamic Finance. Postal Banking. End of an Era in Finance. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space CAMBRIDGE – In the world of economics and finance, revolutions occur rarely and are often detected only in hindsight. But what happened on February 19 can safely be called the end of an era in global finance. Capital structure. State capitalists are having their day. This week, as the world prepared for the G20 summit, I found myself sitting in a London office with two middle-aged executives, one the owner of a Vancouver-based uranium-mining company and the other a Russian executive whose Kremlin-owned nuclear conglomerate had just bought a controlling stake in the Canadian company; together, they hoped to dominate the uranium scene in Kazakhstan.
Twenty years ago, that sentence would have been too preposterous for science fiction. Ten years ago, the North American company would have been talking about buying its Russian counterpart, at a bargain price, if it could find a way to buy or bribe its way past the government officials who controlled it. This weekend, as the humbled democratic leaders of the world's major market economies meet in Toronto, as equals, with the authoritarian leaders of China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, there is an unprecedented sense that the second group has the upper hand.
At the moment, the two need each other. Mr.