Travis Williamson of Albourne moderated a Global Alts New York 2026 panel on the global power shift reshaping cross-border capital. Zongyuan Liu of the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia, Daken Vanderburg of MassMutual, and Jackie Rosner of PAAMCO Prisma joined the discussion. The panel walked through the lessons of the 2022 Russia invasion and sanctions regime, the speed of US economic warfare, what central bank gold buying is signaling, and how China, tariffs, and the multi-currency world are now priced into hedge fund and institutional portfolios.

The global power shift is the single biggest unresolved variable in institutional portfolios. Rosner pulled three lessons from the 2022 episode that still drive how PAAMCO Prisma constructs risk today. First, exit liquidity under extreme scenarios matters more than the brochure suggests, which means stress-testing portfolios for tails rather than averages. Second, geopolitical headlines transmit to asset prices faster than they transmit to fundamentals, which forces managers to react in shorter windows. Third, the statistician who drowned crossing a river that was on average three feet deep is the right mental model. The extreme depth gets you, not the average.

What the speed of economic warfare tells us about the global power shift

Liu offered the historical comparison. He has studied many decades of military and economic warfare. The speed at which the United States captured Russian sovereign assets in 2022 was unprecedented and changed how central banks think about reserves. The clearest evidence is in gold. Central bank gold buying has run at multi-decade highs since 2022, and the relative shift away from treasuries toward gold among non-Western central banks is now a structural fact rather than a tactical hedge.

Vanderburg added the wealth management dimension. Client questions have moved from tactical positioning to structural ones about dollar hegemony, sanctions risk for cross-border family wealth, and the durability of US-centric portfolios.

How tariffs and the multi-currency world reshape allocation

Williamson asked the panel to translate the global power shift into actual portfolio decisions. Rosner argued for more global macro and relative-value exposure — policy dispersion across G20 central banks is widening rather than narrowing. Liu emphasized that tariffs are no longer a marginal tax. They are the primary tool of industrial policy on both sides of the Pacific, and the resulting supply chain bifurcation reshapes everything from semiconductor margins to commodity trade flows.

Vanderburg framed the practical advice for wealth clients. Diversify across currencies, not just across countries. Use real assets and hard commodities as a hedge against the policy uncertainty that defines the multi-currency world.

What allocators should underwrite next

The panel closed on the China question. Liu argued that the consensus underestimates how much of US industrial policy is now structured as a direct response to Chinese industrial capacity rather than as standalone domestic stimulus. The global power shift is not partisan in the way Washington framing sometimes suggests. It is bipartisan and likely structural through the next decade.