Includes bibliographical references (p. 182-195) and index.

1. Routes to international political economy: accounting for international monetary order -- 2. The power of cities and their limits: principal financial centres and international monetary order -- 3. Between change and continuity: reconstructing "Bretton Woods" -- 4. The era of decentralized globalization -- 5. Decentralized globalization and the exercise of public authority -- 6. Finance, power, and the world-economy approach: towards an historical-institutional international political economy -- Appendix. Top merchant/investment banks, by city and era.

In this book, Randall D. Germain explores the international organization of credit in a changing world-economy. At the center of his analysis is the construction of successive international organizations of credit, built around principal financial centers and constituted by overlapping networks of credit institutions, mainly investment, commercial, and central banks. A critical historical approach to international political economy allows Germain to stress both the multiple roles of finance within the world-economy and the centrality of financial practices and networks for the construction of monetary order. He argues that the private global credit system which has replaced Bretton Woods is anchored unevenly across the world's three principal financial centers: New York, London, and Tokyo. This new balance of power is fragmented with respect to relations between states and ambiguous in terms of how power is exercised between public authorities and private financial institutions.

Germain's analysis thus suggests that we are living through a period of fragile international monetary order.