" The trouble spread to one continent after another like a virus." USA Today

On December 8, 1997, the government of Thailand shut down 56 of their countries finance houses. These finance houses borrowed heavily in U.S. dollars and lent those dollars out to Thai businesses for the building of hotels, office blocks, luxury apartments and factories. Almost overnight, these private banks had been bankrupted by the crash of the Thai currency, the baht. This situation caused a domino effect on other leading businesses that caused money problems. Many businesses couldn't pay the finance houses back, many finance houses couldn't repay their foreign leaders and the whole system went into gridlock putting 20,000 white-collar employees out of work. The Thai crisis triggered a general flight of capital out of practically all the Southeast Asian emerging markets, driving down the value of currencies in South Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia. Southeast Asian slowdown began to have an important effect on commodity prices around the world, including Russia. Too many of Russia's factories couldn't make anything of value. Without much of a growing economy, the

The cold war system that had dominated international affairs since 1945 had been replaced by a new interconnected system called globalization. World War 1, the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression broke the first era of globalization and global finance capitalism apart. The Cold War was also an international system and it lasted from 1945 to 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. It was replaced by another system: the new era of globalization we are now in. What is new today is the degree and intensity with which the world is being linked into a single globalized marketplace. The new era of globalization, compared to the one before World War 1, is turbocharged. It is built around falling telecommunications costs- thanks to microchips and the Internet. People can now offer and trade services globally, from giving advice to software writing to data processing. This era of globalization is unique not only because these technologies are making it possible for corporations to reach farther, faster, cheaper and deeper around the world, but because it is allowing individuals to do so. To understand the post-Cold War world, you have to start by understanding that a new international system has succeeded it- globalization.

We have gone from a command and control leadership model in the Cold War to what World Link magazine call's "command and connect" leadership model in the globalization era.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2325
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)