The collective name for the various official and legal arrangements that govern international financial flows in the form of loan investment, payments for goods and services, interest and profit remittances. The main elements are the surveillance and monitoring of economic and financial stability, and provision of multilateral finance to countries with balance of payments difficulties (WHO). With the decline of Bretton Woods, much of the power over the international financial system, and especially power over how credit is created, bought, and sold, has transferred back to money capitalists. With the growth of electronic telecommunications, these money capitalists are able to operate on a global scale and with a speed of reaction which states find very difficult to emulate. In this new international financial system, ‘the balance has shifted from a financial structure which was predominantly state-based with some transnational links, to a predominantly global system in which some residual local differences in markets, institutions, and regulations persist’. (Thrift and Leyshon (1994) Pol. Geog. 3, 4, 299). See B. Christophers (2013).