As financial power has grown, it has managed, nearly everywhere, to fundamentally undermine (or at least widen loopholes in) those Bretton Woods regulatory systems that had once sought to keep it in check (Stiglitz 2010, 1–26). Banking, investment and insurance firm mergers have, as early as the 1990s, facilitated the emergence of colossal economic powerhouses headquartered almost exclusively in North America and Europe, which both finance and benefit from the International Monetary Fundand World Bank-brokered politics of third-world debt and structural adjustment (Bello 2013).

Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, loc. 150