Introduction

The idea that the end of “embedded liberalism” ushered in the decline of American finance has been challenged by IPE authors who have pointed out that the expansion of global markets was responsible for the creation of a new, more indirect and structural pattern of financial power relations in which the United States still occupied a central position (e.g., Strange 1986, 1988; Helleiner 1994; Germain 1997). In this and the following chapters, I seek to expand on this insight. It should be noted here that although these authors have offered trenchant critiques of orthodox IPE’s focus on the formal state and its abstract separation from the economy, they have generally not gone far enough in remedying the problem. They take the system of global financial markets as their starting point and then locate U.S. power in relation to this system. But such an approach does not do sufficient justice to the decades-long buildup of the network connections of American financial power and the ways in which the systemic dynamics of modern global finance are functionally imbricated with them. In many ways, financial globalization is not best understood as the reemergence of “global” finance but as the processes whereby the expansionary dynamics of American finance began to take on international dimensions.