The construction of US financial power

Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise USfinancial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyondstate-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the state’s interaction with socioeconomicforces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state andmarket, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural powerand state power. The article then examines literature in the field of cultural political economy(CPE), which emphasises the constitutive importance of the cultural norms and practicessituated at the level of everyday life. The CPE literature fails to challenge established IPEaccounts in some key respects, and the article relates this to its conception of political power.The article develops an institution-based perspective that is more suitable to theorising thelinkages between structural power and state power, and then proceeds to develop aninterpretation of the construction of American financial power over the course of the 20thcentury. It reinterprets some of the key moments in the history of US and global finance andre-examines notions of American financial decline