Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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If governments had laid the foundation at Bretton Woods, it was markets that then took over the next phase of the construction of the dollar's towering role in global finance. It was in capital raising and investment that the dollar would come into its most widespread international use. The spread of the dollar as the dominant currency of international borrowing and investment provided the channels for worldwide transmission of US financial and monetary policies. Further, the dollar-based globalisation of financial markets spurred the development of networks and infrastructure that would give the US unprecedented geopolitical power in the financial sphere. It is therefore all the more surprising that this market for the offshore dollar – otherwise known as the ‘Eurodollar’ssss1 – developed almost entirely outside the purview of American regulators.

The origins of the Eurodollar market are somewhat murky, as there were no published statistics on it until 1963. Although customers had long been allowed to deposit US dollars and other currencies at banks in London and such deposits had been growing during the interwar years, the birth of the Eurodollar market is generally acknowledged to have been in the 1950s. A number of factors contributed to its evolution.