BEIJING – No two crises are alike. That is true of recent financial upheavals – the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the dot-com crisis of 2000, and the global financial crisis of 2008-09. It is also the case with crises sparked by geostrategic shocks, such as wars, pestilence, famine, and pandemics.
Today, we are witnessing a potentially lethal interplay between these two sources of upheaval: a financial crisis, reflected in the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, and a geostrategic crisis, reflected in the deepening cold war between the United States and China. While the origins of each crisis are different, in one sense it doesn’t really matter: The outcome of their interaction is likely to be greater than the sum of the parts.