Wriston's financial innovations helped create the modern Eurodollar market — a vast offshore realm of financial transactions in US dollars happening outside of US borders.
As he explained in 1979, the "current banking network, with its Euromarkets and its automated payments system" seemed dull and technical, but it had immense political consequences.
Wriston helped rebuild this clanking machine into an engine of transformation, welding disjointed national markets into a true world economy.
It began to develop a new kind of sanction, which used its control of "dollar clearing" to force international banks to implement US policy outside its borders.
Instead of the stateless, government-less world that Wriston envisioned, the internationalization of the US dollar became the precedent for a massive transformation of America's financial power.
Persons:
Walter Wriston, Wriston, Friedrich Hayek's, Banks, Eric Sepkes, Eric Helleiner, Henry Holt, Helleiner, Henry Farrell, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Friedrich Schiedel, Abraham Newman
Organizations:
Citibank, Staff, of, Technology, Bankers, JPMorgan, Warburg, Federal Reserve, buccaneers, US Department of, Treasury, SWIFT, Society, Worldwide Interbank, Johns Hopkins, Politics, The Washington Post, School of Foreign Service, Government Department, Georgetown University, Henry Holt and Company
Locations:
London, of London, Europe, Argentina, New York, United States, Eurodollars, Italy, Japan, Soviet Union, America, Iran, Russia, Ukraine