MEXICO CITY — I was living in São Paulo in 1997 when, out of the blue, an investment banker I knew in London called to ask about Brazilian cocktails. He didn’t want one. He needed a name for a potential economic crisis, in the vein of Mexico’s Tequila affair in 1994 and Thailand’s Tom Yum Kung debacle, which was unfolding at the time.

As unlikely as it seemed to most Brazilians then, the crisis did arrive. A default by the Russian government in 1998 set off a run on Brazilian bonds, as investors rushed to pare their holdings in emerging markets by selling the most liquid among them.

Suffering from large trade and budget deficits and a shrinking stock of foreign reserves, Brazil was forced a few months later to sever the real’s link to the dollar and let it sink.

That’s when it dawned on me that we weren’t living in my parent’s economy anymore.

The stable American economic order lasted more than three decades from the end of World War II, when economic cycles were essentially driven by the Federal Reserve’s raising and lowering of interest rates to combat inflation. It started to crumble with the severing of the link between gold and the dollar and the twin oil crises of the 1970s. That ushered in an era of footloose capital, unshackled by three decades of increasing deregulation, that led to the global tides that, for better and worse, now drive economic ups and downs.