The Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are arguably the luckiest generation in history. They grew up in a world reshaped by the end of World War II, decolonisation in Asia and Africa and a ‘rules-based international order’ under benign Pax Americana. The Bretton Woods institutions — the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank — were the backbone of this order.
By the mid-1990s, when the youngest Boomers hit middle age, Western Europe and Japan had risen from war’s ashes, while Asia’s ‘tiger economies’ (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore), Southeast Asian nations (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam), and population behemoths China (post-1978 Premier Deng Xiaoping’s reforms) and India (post-1991 Minister of Finance Manmohan Singh’s reforms) roared to life. The IMF and World Bank fuelled this growth with loans, infrastructure projects and economic discipline.
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