Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise US financial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyond state-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the state’s interaction with socio-economic forces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state and market, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural power and state power. The article then examines literature in the field of cultural political economy (CPE), which emphasises the constitutive importance of the cultural norms and practices situated at the level of everyday life. The CPE literature fails to challenge established IPE accounts in some key respects, and the article relates this to its conception of political power. The article develops an institution-based perspective that is more suitable to theorising the linkages between structural power and state power, and then proceeds to develop an interpretation of the construction of American financial power over the course of the 20th century. It reinterprets some of the key moments in the history of US and global finance and re-examines notions of American financial decline.