Abstract
The need to finance wars led England to introduce important financial innovations in the late seventeenth century that gave rise to the Financial Revolution. This set of mechanisms - long-term public debt, central bank and deep secondary markets - provided Britain with a dominant position in the international monetary system until World War I. However, this gain did not provide the British with structural monetary power despite the central role their financial market and their currency held during the gold standard. In contrast, the United States used its structural monetary power not only to implement the Bretton Woods fixed-rate regime but also to break and replace it with the current flexible international dollar-based monetary and financial system. The crisis of 2008 shows that American structural power is intact and faces no relevant potential competitors.
Keywords:
International Monetary System; Structural Monetary Power; Gold standard; Fixed exchange rate dollar regime; Flexible exchange rate dollar regime