United States v. Belmont, 301 U.S. 324 (1937), was a dispute between the federal executive branch and the State of New York over property rights to a deposit from a former Russian corporation with August Belmont & Company, a private New York City banking firm. Belmont established executive predominance over state laws and constitutions in the sphere of foreign policy, and allocated the constitutional power for initiating executive agreements solely to the president of the United States. Background During the Russian Revolution, Petrograd Metal Works, a Russian corporation, deposited a sum of money with August Belmont & Company, a private banker in New York City. On November 6, 1917, the Bolsheviks took control of Russia. With the establishment of the Communist regime, they issued several decrees, which inter alia (among other things) ratified confiscation of private properties without compensation. The Decree of June 15, 1918 was enacted exclusively to outline nationalization of manufacturing companies; a portion of it reads as follows: In an effort to preserve their estates, fugitive business owners had relocated their assets to foreign banks. This impeded Soviet attempts to retrieve those deposits, mainly because they had to negotiate with foreign tribunals which consistently inclined toward the former owners. The United States' non-recognition of the Communist state precluded the Soviet government from filing disputes in U.S. courts. Likewise, as a result of Soviet nationalization, the U.S. could not seek any legal remedies from the Soviet nation. In an attempt to recover the losses due to Russian communalization, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began negotiations with the Communist state. On November 16, 1933, the President held his first annual dinner party, with Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, as his guest. During this event, he presented Litvinov prepared drafts with conditions under which the U.S. was willing to recognize Soviet Russia. The same day, both officials signed their exchanged notes, later known as the Roosevelt–Litvinov Accords. Along with a section acknowledging the Communist state, this document permitted the U.S. government to collect all amounts "due or that may be found to be due" deposited in the U.S. banks by former owners of Russian corporations, provided that the Soviet government was "to be duly notified in each case of any amount realized by the Government of the United States from such release and assignment." Within the nine years of litigations, the United States Department of Justice successfully recovered nearly