With a backpedalling Washington now completely isolated in its opposition to the China-led venture and with support and enthusiasm running so high that even Beijing itself is apparently surprised, none other than "the hawk" that was almost, kind of considered for the chairmanship of the Fed is out with a sharp rebuke of the US stance calling March "the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system." Of course we've been persistent in our contention that the AIIB represents much more than an attempt on China's part to provide an alternative source of infrastructure financing to fill the gaps left by the ADB, and as is made abundantly clear by the following, the "secret" is certainly out...

Time US Leadership Woke Up To New Economic Era, by Larry Summers 

This past month may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system. True, there have been any number of periods of frustration for the US before, and times when American behaviour was hardly multilateralist, such as the 1971 Nixon shock, ending the convertibility of the dollar into gold. But I can think of no event since Bretton Woods comparable to the combination of China's effort to establish a major new institution and the failure of the US to persuade dozens of its traditional allies, starting with Britain, to stay out of it.