Most economists and political scientists assume that efficiency, the invisible hand, is the preeminent factor in monetary decisions; questions of power and the role it plays in monetary policy are largely neglected. This pathbreaking book redirects attention to monetary power and provides an original framework for assessing its role in relations between sovereign states. At present, states are the critical players in monetary relations; they control the production and distribution of the money supply, including the provision of international liquidity and the availability of payments financing. David M. Andrews and the contributors to this volume understand "power" as the capacity to alter the behavior of other actors, including the policies of other states. International Monetary Power provides a thorough overview of how money is used as a tool to achieve international political aims.

A decade of crises has reminded us of the fragility of the international financial system. Conventional wisdom holds that uncertainty is the basic problem of financial governance, and attempts to contain ambiguity have dominated recent financial reform efforts. Jacqueline Best, however, contends that ambiguity can play a valuable role in international political and economic stability. The stability of the postwar era depended, Best suggests, on a carefully maintained balance between coherence and ambiguity. In her view, the collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange-rate regime was caused in large part by the increasing rigidity of the system and its corresponding inability to accommodate ambiguity. This is a novel argument in an area much discussed by economists and political scientists. Their debate has focused on uncertainty as a technical problem and transparency as the solution. Although such policies are presented as technical, Best demonstrates that they are also political, have cultural consequences, and may prove counterproductive. Rather than assume that transparency is the ultimate goal, Best argues, we must recognize that ambiguity is pervasive, substantive, and potentially constructive. To read this book is to comprehend more deeply the ways in which politics is fundamental to economic theory and practice and to understand why the economy requires political leadership in order to flourish.

The international financial community blamed the Asian crisis of 1997-1998 on deep failures of domestic financial governance. To avoid similar crises in the future, this community adopted and promoted a set of international best practice standards of financial governance. The G7 asked specialized public and private sector bodies to set international standards, and tasked the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank with their global dissemination. Non-Western countries were thereby encouraged to emulate Western practices in banking and securities supervision, corporate governance, financial disclosure, and policy transparency. In Governing Finance, Andrew Walter explains why Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, and Thailand—key targets and test cases of this international standards project—were placed under intense pressure to transform their domestic financial governance. Walter finds that the depth of the economic crisis, and more enduring aspects of Asian capitalism, such as family ownership of firms, made substantive compliance with international standards very costly for the private sector and politically difficult for governments to achieve. In spite of international compliance pressure, the result was varying degrees of cosmetic or mock compliance. In a book containing lessons for any agency or country attempting to implement lasting change in financial governance, Walter emphasizes the limits of global regulatory convergence in the absence of support from domestic politicians, institutions, and firms.

Since the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98, East Asian economies have sought to make themselves less vulnerable to global financial markets by transforming the regional financial architecture. With Japan as a leading actor, they have introduced initiatives to provide emergency financing to crisis economies, support the development of local-currency bond markets, and better coordinate currency policies. In Currency and Contest in East Asia, William W. Grimes builds on years of primary research and scores of interviews with participants and policy analysts to provide the most accurate, complete, and detailed description available of attempts to build financial cooperation among East Asian countries. Adapting realist political economy theory to the realities of contemporary global finance, Grimes places regional issues firmly in the wider context of great-power rivalries. He argues that financial regionalism can best be understood as one arena for competition among Japan, the United States, and China. Despite their mutual desire for regional prosperity and economic stability, these three powers have conflicting political interests. Their struggles for regional leadership raise questions about the long-term feasibility of regional financial cooperation, the possible effects of Sino-Japanese rivalry on regional financial stability, and the potential for East Asian financial regionalism to undermine the long-established-albeit waning-global and regional dominance of the United States and the dollar.

In his exceedingly timely and innovative look at the ramifications of the collapse of the U.S. housing market, Herman M. Schwartz makes the case that worldwide, U.S. growth and power over the last twenty years has depended in large part on domestic housing markets. Mortgage-based securities attracted a cascade of overseas capital into the U.S. economy. High levels of private home ownership, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom, have helped pull in a disproportionately large share of world capital flows.As events since mid-2008 have made clear, mortgage lenders became ever more eager to extend housing loans, for the more mortgage packages they securitized, the higher their profits. As a result, they were dangerously inventive in creating new mortgage products, notably adjustable-rate and subprime mortgages, to attract new, mainly first-time, buyers into the housing market. However, mortgage-based instruments work only when confidence in the mortgage system is maintained. Regulatory failures in the American S&L sector, the accounting crisis that led to the extinction of Arthur Andersen, and the subprime crisis that destroyed Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and damaged many other big financial institutions have jeopardized a significant engine of economic growth. Schwartz concentrates on the impact of U.S. regulatory failure on the international economy. He argues that the "local" problem of the housing crisis carries substantial and ongoing risks for U.S. economic health, the continuing primacy of the U.S. dollar in international financial circles, and U.S. hegemony in the world system.

Financial instability threatens the global economy. The volatility of capital movements across national borders has led many observers to argue for a reformed "global financial architecture," a body of consistent rules and institutions to prevent financial crises. Yet regulators have a decidedly mixed record in their attempts to create global standards for the financial system. David Andrew Singer seeks to explain the varying pressures on regulatory agencies to negotiate internationally acceptable rules and suggests that the variation is largely traceable to the different domestic political pressures faced by regulators. In Regulating Capital, Singer provides both a theory of the effects of domestic pressures on international regulation and a detailed analysis of regulators' attempts at international rulemaking in banking, securities, and insurance. Singer addresses the complexities of global finance in an accessible style, and he does not turn away from the more dramatic aspects of globalization; he makes clear the international implications of bank failures and stock-market crashes, the rise of derivatives, and the catastrophic financial losses caused by Hurricane Katrina and the events of September 11.

A Europe Made of Money is a new history of the making of the European Monetary System (EMS), based on extensive archive research. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol highlights two long-term processes in the monetary and economic negotiations in the decade leading up to the founding of the EMS in 1979. The first is a transnational learning process involving a powerful, networked European monetary elite that shaped a habit of cooperation among technocrats. The second stresses the importance of the European Council, which held regular meetings between heads of government beginning in 1974, giving EEC legitimacy to monetary initiatives that had previously involved semisecret and bilateral negotiations. The interaction of these two features changed the EMS from a fairly trivial piece of administrative business to a tremendously important political agreement. The inception of the EMS was greeted as one of the landmark achievements of regional cooperation, a major leap forward in the creation of a unified Europe. Yet Mourlon-Druol's account stresses that the EMS is much more than a success story of financial cooperation. The technical suggestions made by its architects reveal how state elites conceptualized the larger project of integration. And their monetary policy became a marker for the conception of European identity. The unveiling of the EMS, Mourlon-Druol concludes, represented the convergence of material interests and symbolic, identity-based concerns.

Capital as Will and Imagination investigates the nature of capital creation—a fundamental, unresolved question in the history of capitalism. Japan's experience after World War II offers the clearest possible case study. To understand what happened, this study turns to a neglected aspect of Joseph Schumpeter's theory of economic development: the nexus between money creation by banks, investment, and inflation. Economists and planners in postwar Japan found in Schumpeter's ideas a description of what they saw happening around them. They also put these ideas directly to work. Asian-style high-speed growth, as pioneered in Japan in the 1950s, presents capitalist industrial development in its most intensified form, but in fact the story is a global one. The shadow of credit is debt, and the worldwide debt bubbles of recent times reveal the limits of the twentieth-century growth model.

The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 was both an economic catastrophe and a watershed event in world politics. In American Power after the Financial Crisis, Jonathan Kirshner explains how the crisis altered the international balance of power, affecting the patterns and pulse of world politics. The crisis, Kirshner argues, brought about an end to what he identifies as the "second postwar American order" because it undermined the legitimacy of the economic ideas that underpinned that order especially those that encouraged and even insisted upon uninhibited financial deregulation. The crisis also accelerated two existing trends: the relative erosion of the power and political influence of the United States and the increased political influence of other states, most notably, but not exclusively, China. Looking ahead, Kirshner anticipates a New Heterogeneity in thinking about how best to manage domestic and international money and finance. These divergences such as varying assessments of and reactions to newly visible vulnerabilities in the American economy and changing attitudes about the long-term appeal of the dollar will offer a bold challenge to the United States and its essentially unchanged disposition toward financial policy and regulation. This New Heterogeneity will contribute to greater discord among nations about how best to manage the global economy. A provocative look at how the 2007 2008 economic collapse diminished U.S. dominance in world politics, American Power after the Financial Crisis suggests that the most significant and lasting impact of the crisis and the Great Recession will be the inability of the United States to enforce its political and economic priorities on an increasingly recalcitrant world. "

In Ruling Capital, Kevin P. Gallagher demonstrates how several emerging market and developing countries (EMDs) managed to reregulate cross-border financial flows in the wake of the global financial crisis, despite the political and economic difficulty of doing so at the national level. Gallagher also shows that some EMDs, particularly the BRICS coalition, were able to maintain or expand their sovereignty to regulate cross-border finance under global economic governance institutions. Gallagher combines econometric analysis with in-depth interviews with officials and interest groups in select emerging markets and policymakers at the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the G-20 to explain key characteristics of the global economy. Gallagher develops a theory of countervailing monetary power that shows how emerging markets can counter domestic and international opposition to the regulation of cross-border finance. Although many countries were able to exert countervailing monetary power in the wake of the crisis, such power was not sufficient to stem the magnitude of unstable financial flows that continue to plague the world economy. Drawing on this theory, Gallagher outlines the significant opportunities and obstacles to regulating cross-border finance in the twenty-first century.

Exchange rate policy has profound consequences for economic development, financial crises, and international political conflict. Some governments in the developing world maintain excessively weak and "undervalued" exchange rates, a policy that promotes export-led development but often heightens tensions with foreign governments. Many other developing countries overvalue their exchange rates, which increases consumers' purchasing power but often reduces economic growth. In Demanding Devaluation, David Steinberg argues that the demands of powerful interest groups often dictate government decisions about the level of the exchange rate. Combining rich qualitative case studies of China, Argentina, South Korea, Mexico, and Iran with cross-national statistical analyses, Steinberg reveals that exchange rate policy is heavily influenced by a country s domestic political arrangements. Interest group demands influence exchange rate policy, and national institutional structures shape whether interest groups lobby for an undervalued or an overvalued rate. A country s domestic political system helps determine whether it undervalues its exchange rate and experiences explosive economic growth or if it overvalues its exchange rate and sees its economy stagnate as a result."

The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 was supposed to be the death knell for the developmental state. The International Monetary Fund supplied emergency funds for shattered economies but demanded that states liberalize financial markets and withdraw from direct involvement in the economy. Financial liberalization was meant to spell the end of strategic industry policy and the state-directed "policy lending" it involved. Yet, largely unremarked by analysts, South Korea has since seen a striking revival of financial activism. Policy lending by state-owned development banks has returned the state to the core of the financial system. Korean development banks now account for one quarter of all loans and take the lead in providing low-cost finance to local manufacturing firms in strategic industries. Elizabeth Thurbon argues that an ideational analysis can help explain this renewed financial activism. She demonstrates the presence of a "developmental mindset" on the part of political leaders and policy elites in Korea. This mindset involves shared ways of thinking about the purpose of finance and its relationship to the productive economy. The developmental mindset has a long history in Korea but is subject to the vicissitudes of political and economic circumstances. Thurbon traces the structural, institutional, political, and ideational factors that have strengthened and at times weakened the developmental consensus, culminating in the revival of financial activism in Korea. In doing so, Thurbon offers a novel defense of the developmental state idea and a new framework for investigating the emergence and evolution of developmental states. She also canvasses the implications of the Korean experience for wider debates concerning the future of financial activism in an era of financialization, energy insecurity, and climate change.

In recent decades, Tokyo, London, and New York have been the sites of credit bubbles of historically unprecedented magnitude. Central bankers have enjoyed almost unparalleled power and autonomy. They have cooperated to construct and preserve towering structures of debt, reshaping relations of power and ownership around the world. In Central Banks and Gold, Simon James Bytheway and Mark Metzler explore how this financialized form of globalism took shape a century ago, when Tokyo joined London and New York as a major financial center.As revealed here for the first time, close cooperation between central banks began along an unexpected axis, between London and Tokyo, around the year 1900, with the Bank of England's secret use of large Bank of Japan funds to intervene in the London markets. Central-bank cooperation became multilateral during World War I—the moment when Japan first emerged as a creditor country. In 1919 and 1920, as Japan, Great Britain, and the United States adopted deflation policies, the results of cooperation were realized in the world's first globally coordinated program of monetary policy. It was also in 1920 that Wall Street bankers moved to establish closer ties with Tokyo. Bytheway and Metzler tell the story of how the first age of central-bank power and pride ended in the disaster of the Great Depression, when a rush for gold brought the system crashing down. In all of this, we see also the quiet but surprisingly central place of Japan. We see it again today, in the way that Japan has unwillingly led the world into a new age of post-bubble economics.

Bolder economic policy could have addressed the persistent bouts of deflation in post-bubble Japan, write Gene Park, Saori N. Katada, Giacomo Chiozza, and Yoshiko Kojo in Taming Japan's Deflation . Despite warnings from economists, intense political pressure, and well-articulated unconventional policy options to address this problem, Japan's central bank, the Bank of Japan (BOJ), resisted taking the bold actions that the authors believe would have significantly helped. With Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's return to power, Japan finally shifted course at the start of 2013 with the launch of Abenomics—an economic agenda to reflate the economy—and Abe's appointment of new leadership at the BOJ. As Taming Japan's Deflation shows, the BOJ's resistance to experimenting with bolder policy stemmed from entrenched policy ideas that were hostile to activist monetary policy. The authors explain how these policy ideas evolved over the course of the BOJ's long history and gained dominance because of the closed nature of the broader policy network. The explanatory power of policy ideas and networks suggests a basic inadequacy in the dominant framework for analysis of the politics of monetary policy derived from the literature on central bank independence. This approach privileges the interaction between political principals and their supposed agents, central bankers; but Taming Japan's Deflation shows clearly that central bankers' views, shaped by ideas and institutions, can be decisive in determining monetary policy. Through a combination of institutional analysis, quantitative empirical tests, in-depth case studies, and structured comparison of Japan with other countries, the authors show that, ultimately, the decision to adopt aggressive monetary policy depends largely on the bankers' established policy ideas and policy network.

With a new look at the 1880s financial reforms in Japan, Steven J. Ericson's Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan overturns widely held views of the program carried out by Finance Minister Matsukata Masayoshi. As Ericson shows, rather than constituting an orthodox financial-stabilization program—a sort of precursor of the "neoliberal" reforms promoted by the IMF in the 1980s and 1990s—Matsukata's policies differed in significant ways from both classical economic liberalism and neoliberal orthodoxy. The Matsukata financial reform has become famous largely for the wrong reasons, and Ericson sets the record straight. He shows that Matsukata intended to pursue fiscal retrenchment and budget-balancing when he became finance minister in late 1881. Various exigencies, including foreign military crises and a worsening domestic depression, compelled him instead to increase spending by running deficits and floating public bonds. Though he drastically reduced the money supply, he combined the positive and contractionary policies of his immediate predecessors to pull off a program of "expansionary austerity" paralleling state responses to financial crisis elsewhere in the world both then and now. Through a new and much-needed recalibration of this pivotal financial reform, Financial Stabilization in Meiji Japan demonstrates that, in several ways, ranging from state-led export promotion to the creation of a government-controlled central bank, Matsukata advanced policies that were more in line with a nationalist, developmentalist approach than with a liberal economic one. Ericson shows that Matsukata Masayoshi was far from a rigid adherent of classical economic liberalism.

In the late nineteenth century, as much of the world adopted some variant of the gold standard, China remained the most populous country still using silver. Yet China had no unified national currency; there was not one monetary standard but many. Silver coins circulated alongside chunks of silver and every transaction became an encounter of wits. China and the End of Global Silver, 1873-1937 focuses on how officials, policy makers, bankers, merchants, academics, and journalists in China and around the world answered a simple question: how should China change its monetary system? Far from a narrow, technical issue, Chinese monetary reform is a dramatic story full of political revolutions, economic depressions, chance, and contingency. As different governments in China attempted to create a unified monetary standard in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States, England, and Japan tried to shape the direction of Chinese monetary reform for their own benefit. Austin Dean argues convincingly that the Silver Era in world history ended owing to the interaction of imperial competition in East Asia and the state-building projects of different governments in China. When the Nationalist government of China went off the silver standard in 1935, it marked a key moment not just in Chinese history but in world history.

"International taxation rules allow Apple, Starbucks, and Nike to avoid billions of dollars of taxes. News stories have focused on tax dodging in developed countries, but developing countries lose at least $200 billion per year in tax revenue. In the Global South, an international tax regime designed by the states of multi-national corporations limits the local ability to raise sorely needed tax revenue from foreign investors. How did developing countries give up their right to tax foreign companies? Martin Hearson charts their assimilation into an OECD-led regime from independence through to the present day."—

In England's Cross of Gold, James Ashley Morrison challenges the conventional view that the UK's ruinous return to gold in 1925 was inevitable. Instead, he offers a new perspective on the struggles among elites in London to define and redefine the gold standard―from the first discussions during the Great War; through the titanic ideological clash between Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes; to the final, ill-fated implementation of the "new gold standard." Following World War I, Churchill promised to restore the ancient English gold standard―and thus Britain's greatness. Keynes portended that this would prove to be one of the most momentous―and ill-advised―decisions in financial history. From the vicious peace settlement at Versailles to the Great Depression, the gold standard was central to the worst disasters of the time. Economically, Churchill's move exacerbated the difficulties of repairing economies shattered by war. Politically, it set countries at odds as each endeavored to amass gold, sowing the seeds of further strife. England's Cross of Gold, grounded in masterful archival research, reveals that these events turned crucially on the beliefs of a handful of pivotal policymakers. It recasts the legends of Churchill, Keynes, and their collision, and it shows that the gold standard itself was a metaphysical abstraction rooted more in mythology than material reality.

Exploring Russia's re-entry into global capital markets at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Global Finance, Local Control shows how economic integration became deeply entangled with a bare-knuckled struggle for control over the vestiges of the Soviet empire. Igor Logvinenko reveals how the post-communist Russian economy became a full-fledged participant in the international financial sector without significantly improving the local rule of law. By the end of Vladimir Putin's second presidential term, Russia was more integrated into the global financial system than at any point in the past. However, the country's longstanding deficiencies—including widespread corruption, administration of justice, and an increasingly overbearing state—continued unabated. Scrutinizing stock-market restrictions on foreign ownership during the first fifteen years of Russia's economic transition, Logvinenko concludes that financial internationalization allowed local elites to raise capital from foreign investors while maintaining control over local assets. They legitimized their wealth using Western institutions, but they did so on their terms. Global Finance, Local Control delivers a somber lesson about the integration of emerging markets: without strong domestic rule-of-law protections, financial internationalization entrenches oligarchic capitalism and strengthens authoritarian regimes.

To the Brink of Destruction exposes how America's rating agencies helped generate the global financial crisis of 2007 and beyond, surviving and thriving in the aftermath. Despite widespread scrutiny, rating agencies continued to operate on the same business model and wield extraordinary power, exerting extensive influence over public policy. Timothy J. Sinclair brings the shadowy corners of this story to life by examining congressional testimony, showing how the wheels of accountability turned―and ultimately failed―during the crisis. He asks how and why the agencies risked their lucrative franchise by aligning so closely with a process of financial innovation that came undone during the crisis. What he finds is that key institutions, including the agencies, changed from being judges to being advocates years before the crisis, eliminating a vital safety valve meant to hinder financial excess. Sinclair's well-researched investigation offers a clear, accessible explanation of structured finance and how it works. To the Brink of Destruction avoids tired accusations, instead providing novel insight into the role rating agencies played in the worst crisis of modern global capitalism.