The real losers are the low-income economies that must contend with the worst of both the old world and the new. Lacking middle-income countries’ domestic savings rates, capital markets and foreign-exchange reserves, they are simultaneously reliant on foreign capital flows for investment and less insulated from their sudden reversals. Lacking economic heft, they are more vulnerable to being forced to choose a geopolitical side, restricting their access to funding. The dilemma has become familiar to such countries, and nowhere more than in the next arena of change for the global financial system: payments.
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