TY - JOUR T1 - Globalization and Cross-Border Exchanges JF - Trading SP - 90 LP - 94 VL - 2002 IS - 1 AU - Graciela Chichilnisky Y1 - 2002/03/20 UR - http://guides.pm-research.com/content/2002/1/90.abstract N2 - As investors trade increasingly across national boundaries, the $30 trillion per year in cross-border trades is stressing our ability to handle this volume. Indeed $1.8 trillion worth of trades are left unexecuted or unsettled each business day. Yet cross-border trading, doubling in volume every two years, offers the hope of meeting crucial capital needs in the world economy. Cross-border markets could help extend the successful Bretton Woods institutions—the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—that have been sources of liquidity for the world economy since World War II. If cross-border trading is to reach its potential, we must have updated systems for handling such trades. The Internet offers an ideal vehicle to “web-enable” the giant but loosely organized networks of institutions, broker-dealers, global custodians, and subcustodians that today settle cross-border trades. Current communication is through an awkward and error-prone patchwork of fax, telex, telephone, and industry protocols such as SWIFT and FIX that must be improved. If we use our worldwide access to Internet technology intelligently, there is no need to change the way we do business; rather, we can instead do it better and faster, reducing costs and risks and dramatically improving services to the end user, the investor. ER -