Public accountability v. private interest government

When Sir George Bolton, matter-of-factly described the creation of the Eurodollar market as the cobbling together of ‘the bits and pieces that were floating about’, he was alluding to the harnessing of the mighty greenback to the ‘historical mechanisms’ inherited from the old London Bill market and the free international financial system of the nineteenth century. Once he and his merchant banking chums in the City had substituted a dysfunctional sterling with the large quantity of dollars that had been circulating outside of the US — and for all intents and purposes outside its monetary control — since the late 1940s, it was possible for an unregulated money market to be reconvened — a system free from capital, credit and ratio controls. The ‘private exercise of monetary authority’ was back on track. In this way, a new global money medium evolved, anchored in an old institutional framework. A parallel international money market was created, able to operate effectively outside of British banking regulation but within British sovereignty: an onshore external market trading in Eurodollars, otherwise and most commonly described as offshore.