ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the evolution of credit in the Unites States and its relationship to the rise of US power in the period between the 1790s and 1990s. The United States did not suddenly appear as the planet's dominant power in credit. While the structure of credit in the United States was radically transformed in the first part of the twentieth century, the strength of US banks around the world grew considerably. The Great Depression and the Second World War greatly diminished the power of British and other European banks. In Asia, Japan was occupied by the United States and China fell into a civil war in the late 1940s. The course of US dominance of the global credit system was largely a twentieth-century phenomena, though the foundations were established in the late nineteenth century.
