Money Games: Currencies and Power in the Contemporary World Economy John Agnew Department of Geography, UCLA, Los Angeles CA, USA; jagnew@geog.ucla.edu Abstract: A well-known clich´ e has it that “money makes the world go round” Certainly, monetary arrangements, specifically exchange-rate mechanisms, can serve to show the degree to which markets and states intersect to direct the workings of the world economy. It is common to assume that the singular model over recent decades has been a neoliberal one based on independent floating exchange rates. I challenge this assumption by showing that a number of different combinations of money and power have operated in the recent past, creating a number of distinctive “money games”. Only one of these, the globalist/transnational, is facing a particularly severe crisis. The others, what I term the classic/territorial, integrative/shared, and imperialist/substitute provide available alternatives. The recent history, geographical features, and future prospects of the various money games are the main concerns of the essay. The analysis welcomes the recent financial crisis as providing an opportunity to further pluralize political-economic visions beyond the perceived dominant one-size-fits-all neoliberal ideology of the globalist regime. Keywords: money games, exchange rates, power Much discussion of the world economy by radical geographers is currently still posed in terms of either US hegemony or US Empire. Yet, many states and other actors in world politics are already part of global political-economic arrangements of one sort or another that point beyond such limited options. In fact, the world economy as a whole has never been entirely anchored to that of the USA. This has been particularly true of the world monetary system since the 1980s. But we have become used to thinking of the world economy as centered on the USA and of the spread since the 1980s of a neoliberal globalization that has enshrined so-called Anglo-American capitalism as the global standard of economic practice. Even within the US domain of systematic influence, however, those parts of the world most immediately tied to the US economy and with the least institutional independence from it, change is also in the air. The floating monetary exchange rates at the heart of the US-dominated global financial system since the 1970s have now transmitted the contradictions of a US economy increasingly in hock to the rest of the world back home (Bulard 2008; Wade 2008). 1 In this context, the possibility that the USA can be the singular source of any new and, at least, potentially global system, as it was in 1944 Antipode Vol. 41 No. S1 2009 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 214–238 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00723.x C  2009 The Author Journal compilation C  2009 Editorial Board of Antipode.