Randall Germain explores the international organization of credit in a changing world economy in this book. At the centre of his analysis is the construction of successive international organizations of credit, built around principal financial centers (PFCs) and constituted by overlapping networks of credit institutions, mainly investment, commercial and central banks. A critical historical approach to international political economy (IPE) 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 irrevocably fragmented with respect to relations between states, and highly ambiguous in terms of how power is exercised between public authorities and private financial institutions. Germain's analysis thus suggests that we are living in a period of fragile international monetary order.

This IPE Classic provides a theoretical and historical overview of globalization and its impact upon the global political economy during the final years of the 20th century. It assesses significant developments associated with the changing organizational parameters of private markets and public authority, and connects these issues with themes drawn from philosophical, historical, technological and cultural debates. With a new Preface and Foreword, it provides a framework of analysis that is rooted in the tradition of political economy, but which engages with similarly holistic inter-disciplinary pursuits.

Randall Germain explores the changing political economy of finance at the global level. He relates changes in global finance to wider changes in the organization of the international economy, and considers how commercial and investment banks have responded institutionally to these changes. Changes in the institutional organization of credit have rendered traditional policy instruments for controlling credit less useful today than in the past. Germain thus argues that the international organization of credit is likely to be relatively unstable into the twenty-first century, and the role of states within the global credit system will be precarious.