Mary Bridges is a Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on US global power and infrastructure building. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, 2024) shows how U.S. multinational banks became critical instruments of both global capitalism and US influence in the early twentieth century. The book, which was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, reveals how U.S. banks learned to profit from trade finance while deepening their entanglements with the federal government. Bridges previously held fellowships at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Yale University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in international relations from Yale, and a B.A. in history and science from Harvard. Before graduate school, she worked as a business reporter and editor.
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Episode 489
Mary Bridges
How America Built A Durable Dollar Empire | Mary Bridges
Mary Bridges is a Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on US global power and infrastructure building. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, 2024) shows how U.S. multinational banks became critical instruments of both global capitalism and US influence in the early twentieth century. The book, which was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, reveals how U.S. banks learned to profit from trade finance while deepening their entanglements with the federal government. Bridges previously held fellowships at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Yale University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in international relations from Yale, and a B.A. in history and science from Harvard. Before graduate school, she worked as a business reporter and editor.
In Episode 489 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with historian Mary Bridges, a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and author of Dollars and Dominion, about the origins of America’s financial empire, the rise of the dollar from a second-rate currency to the most decentralized form of international money in world history, and what could accelerate or inhibit its continued domination.
The first hour traces the origins of America’s financial empire following the end of the Spanish-American War, when the dollar wasn’t in the same league as the British pound and any American trader moving goods abroad had to go directly through London. Bridges walks us through the messy, often improvised 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 enterprise 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.
The second hour traces the dollar’s evolution into the most decentralized form of international money in world history, embedded in every aspect of global trade and commerce. It then turns to a discussion about the pressures and competition facing the dollar today and what could accelerate or inhibit its continued use as a medium of exchange and store of value internationally. The episode closes with a discussion of Bridges’s work on American shipbuilding and maritime power, and her argument that rebuilding America’s industrial base will require the kind of government–private sector partnership that has historically built the country’s most strategically vital industries—the 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 is a Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and a historian of the twentieth-century United States, with a focus on US global power and infrastructure building. Her book Dollars and Dominion: US Bankers and the Making of a Superpower (Princeton University Press, 2024) shows how U.S. multinational banks became critical instruments of both global capitalism and US influence in the early twentieth century. The book, which was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize, reveals how U.S. banks learned to profit from trade finance while deepening their entanglements with the federal government.
Bridges previously held fellowships at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Yale University, and Johns Hopkins SAIS. She earned her Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in international relations from Yale, and a B.A. in history and science from Harvard. Before graduate school, she worked as a business reporter and editor.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
