Over the past decades, few things have been anticipated more anxiously or eagerly than the decline of American financial power. Although few doubt that the United States has benefited tremendously from the expansionary dynamics of financial markets, this advantage is often seen to have involved speculative gains bought at the expense of long-term sustainability – that is, a reckless mortgaging of the future. American finance is seen to be hugely inflated, not supported by economic fundamentals, and forever in danger of collapsing. And so, with each major crisis (the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the stock market crash of 1987, the bursting of the Internet bubble at the turn of the century, and the “subprime” crisis that struck in 2007), a chorus of commentators rises to announce that the days of American hegemony in global finance are now really numbered. But American finance has repeatedly shown itself to be quite resilient. The fact that predictions of imminent decline or collapse have been made time and again over the past decades should lead us to approach such claims with a certain degree of caution. This book argues that there is considerable coherence to the construction of American financial power: Far from a house of cards, it is a proper edifice, built on foundations with their own distinctive points of strength and weakness. Even if the early twenty-first century turns out to have been the apogee of U.S. financial power, American financial actors have built up capacities that they will be able to wield for decades to come, and how the American state manages the dynamics of its financial system will remain a central question until well into the present century.