range of economic and financial regulatory agencies. U.S. entry into World War II led, moreover, to the growth of a permanent American military-industrial complex. The authors argue that these state financial and military institutions made the U.S. into a Great Power capable of superintending the spread of its own brand of capitalism. The U.S. also dominated post-war global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, while the American dollar, backed by U.S. Treasury bonds, became the anchor for international finance. Panitch and Gindin write that the American-financed post-war rebuilding of Europe and Japan, "through low-interest loans, direct grants, technological assistance, and favourable trading relations," created the conditions for investment by U.S. multi-national corporations and eventually for substantial foreign investment in the U.S. America's informal empire As they trace the history of global capitalism, Gindin and Panitch write that in the years after World War II, the U.S. succeeded in building an "informal empire" integrating other capitalist states into a co-ordinated, global capitalist system: The U.S. informal empire constituted a distinctly new form of political rule. Instead of aiming for territorial expansion along the lines of the old empires, U.S. military interventions were primarily aimed at preventing the closure of particular places or whole regions of the globe to capital accumulation. This was part of a larger remit of creating openings for or removing barriers to capital in general, not just U.S. capital. The maintenance and indeed steady growth of U.S. military installations around the globe after World War II, mostly on the territory of independent states, needs to be seen in this light rather than in terms of securing territorial space for the exclusive U.S. use of natural resources and accumulation by its corporations. Although the U.S. dominates in this informal, imperial system, Gindin and Panitch argue that other advanced capitalist states maintain their sovereignty, but must defer to American wishes when it comes to military interventions abroad. "The American state arrogated to itself," they argue, "the sole right to intervene against other sovereign states (which it repeatedly did around the world), and largely reserved to its own discretion the interpretation of international rules and norms." From golden age to crisis The Making of Global Capitalism chronicles the “golden age” of capitalism during the 1950s and '60s when capitalists enjoyed high profits in a booming, full-employment American economy. Workers benefited too from improved social programs and