Towards a Bigger Finance

Towards a Bigger Finance

Finance is action. It is the execution of decisions. A debt settled. A project funded.

They say that politics is the authoritative allocation of values - the decisions as to who gets what. If politics is the will, finance is the way.

Because finance is action, it is inherently messy. It is subjective, normative, political, and global. It reflects diverse preferences, priorities, and judgments. There is little room for assumptions and theory at the closing of a financial transaction. An actual person incurs an actual cost based on an actual assessment of value according to their own utility. Theoretical value becomes price.

In an ideal world, decisions and finance are inseparable. If a decision is made, it is financed; if financing is not possible, the decision cannot be executed. This is often true within small groups such as families, where the people making decisions are also the people responsible for paying for them.

As the size of the group grows, however, both the complexity and the distance between decision-makers and financiers increase. The people making decisions are increasingly different from those arranging the financing. As a result, large organizations, governments, and international institutions often make commitments that are never fully funded.

The cost of this disconnect also grows with the size of the group. Both the volume of unfunded commitments and the consequences of inaction are greatest at the global level, where our decisions concern some of our most important goals, such as the satisfaction of basic human needs for everyone.

Finance weakens as the group grows because finance is fundamentally an information problem. For any risk that needs financing, we must find both attractive risk takers and a structure to transfer the risk efficiently. If we can’t do this at a viable price, the financing does not happen and the decisions we make aren’t executed.

Within a family, this process is straightforward. Family members typically understand both their available sources of financing and how to obtain the funding. Even at the national level, legal systems, financial markets, and institutions are generally well developed and sufficiently understood that financing is relatively predictable. At the global level, however, this predictability breaks down.

Certainly, part of the global challenge arises from the existence of sovereign governments with different laws, regulations, and priorities. But the deeper historical constraint has been one of information. No individual has the capacity to understand every legal system, financial market, regulatory framework, source of capital and cultural preference that might influence the pricing and transfer of risk across the world.

Because our knowledge has historically been limited, we have naturally viewed finance through a local lens. We learn the laws, institutions, and markets of our own countries. Most financial transactions occur locally, with those bearing risk located relatively close to the underlying activity. The scarce resource in global finance has never been money alone; it has been the information needed to connect capital with risk across borders.

Large language models now make genuinely global financial reasoning possible. Rather than beginning with a single national perspective, we can begin with the entire world. We can understand legal systems, markets, financial institutions, and financing mechanisms across jurisdictions before determining which solution best fits a particular problem.

Imagine an important project in Country A. Today financing is primarily conducted with a local or regional view of potential investors and structures. Local limitations in these two areas limit the viability of the project. By starting from a global perspective, the arrangers of the financing can see how similar projects have been financed in other areas – who the best risk takers are on a global basis and how other countries arrange their financial systems to best facilitate the risk transfer. This knowledge can be used to more effectively execute the project in Country A.

As finance knowledge becomes global, decision-makers will be able to make commitments with greater confidence that viable financing mechanisms exist. Rather than limiting our ambitions to what is locally visible, we can search globally for the best allocation of risk and capital.

The result is not simply more efficient finance. It is a world in which the persistent gap between what humanity promises and what it finances begins to close. As that gap narrows, our collective goals - once dismissed as aspirational because they lacked funding - become increasingly achievable. We can be bolder in our decision-making.

The first place to start implementing global perspectives in finance is education. We have spent centuries teaching finance country by country because no human could master every financial system simultaneously. That limitation was technological, not conceptual. Artificial intelligence removes that limitation. The next generation of finance will not be international finance. It will simply be finance practiced from a global perspective.

About GlobeFin.org

GlobeFin.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the internationalization of financial education and innovation. We create educational content from a global perspective and serve as a hub for students, educators, researchers, and innovators around the world.

Our current offerings include more than 600 lessons, support for international collaborative teaching (COIL), a sandbox for AI created member content, a knowledge base of global financial innovation activity, and a weekly Innovation Update highlighting developments from markets around the world.

The GlobeFin.org platform is free to use. We welcome partnerships with organizations and individuals who share our mission and are seeking sponsors to help expand global access to finance education.

Image: Photo of Gaia at the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin. Taken by Shane Hadden July 2026.