How America Built A Durable Dollar Empire | Mary Bridges

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:00)
What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Mary Bridges, a historian of 20th century America and a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, whose research investigates the historical linkages between US foreign relations and the business community. She is also the author of Dollars and Dominion, a history of how the United States built its financial empire through the overseas expansion of American banks at the turn of the 20th century. Mary and I spent the first hour of this conversation tracing the origins of America's financial empire following the end of the Spanish-American War, when the dollar wasn't even in the same league as the British pound, and any American trader who wanted to move goods abroad needed to go directly through London. She walks us through the improvised, often messy story of how that transformation happened, beginning with the multinational expansion of the International Banking Corporation and its eventual absorption into National City Bank, the entanglement of profit-seeking enterprises with the pursuit of empire, and the central role that information, its creation, organization and dissemination played in laying the infrastructure for American financial hegemony. In the second hour, Mary and I discussed the dollar's evolution from its humble roots as a second-rate currency to becoming the most decentralized form of international money in world history, embedded as it is in every aspect of global trade and commerce. From there, we turned to the pressures and competition facing the dollar today and what accelerate or inhibit its continued use as a medium of change and store of value internationally. We end the episode with a brief discussion about Mary's work on American shipbuilding and maritime power, and her argument for why rebuilding America's industrial base will require the kind of partnership between government and the private sector that has historically built the country's most strategically vital industries, the kind of full public commitment the United States tends to muster only when it decides a sector is too important to leave behind.
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Mary Bridges, welcome to Hidden Forces.

**Mary Bridges** (3:16)
Thank you. I'm thrilled to be here.

**Demetri Kofinas** (3:18)
I'm excited to finally have you on the show, Mary. You spoke with our genius community members not long ago about a subject that I'm interested in and about which you published an article in Foreign Policy Magazine related to America's maritime fleet and the US shipbuilding industry.
I think we'll have a chance in the second hour at least to revisit part of that conversation because it does relate to this larger infrastructural thesis that you put forward in your book, Dollars and Dominion, which will form the basis for much of today's conversation. And that has to do with how America built its empire, in particular its financial empire and the US dollar-based financial system that has become such a source of power for Washington. I should also mention that this book fits very nicely within a growing stable of episodes that we've done with guests such as Lev Menand, Perry Merling and Barry Eichengreen, just to name a few, whose books explore each in their own way the growth and eventual internationalization of the US dollar-based financial system. Just so everyone has some context into who you are, you were up until recently at Harvard's Belfer Center and you've since moved down to Texas where you serve as a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. Your bio describes you as a historian of 20th-century America whose research investigates the historical linkages between US foreign relations and the business community.
What exactly does that mean and what does that work look like in practice?

**Mary Bridges** (4:55)
Well, first of all, thanks for the chance to get to speak with you. Yeah, you've had some greats on your show, some real luminaries in my field. I guess I started out in this whole process of inquiry. My background is not as an economist or even as an economic historian necessarily. I was a business reporter, I was a journalist for a while and I had a few experiences of reporting where the size and scale and airspace that US multinationals claimed in geopolitics really blew me away and I didn't feel like my traditional history training had prepared me for the degree to which those institutions like from BlackRock to Google to Facebook were really shaping the way US power looked overseas. That was the core dynamic I wanted to understand in my historical research.