During the Great War, J.P. Morgan bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Henry P. Davison, and Dwight W. Morrow expanded their visions of organizing across distances and supported the development of spaces where like-minded individuals could make coordinated decisions regarding the stability of industrial capitalism. These financial elites focused not only on profits but also on deeper ideas. Their experience organizing across distances, first domestically and then across the Atlantic, demonstrates the importance of these financiers to visions of global economic governance centered on information exchange and communication, intimate long-distance relationships, and deliberation among perceived equals, which are essential elements of merchant banking. Their visions further reflected a hierarchical and racial understanding of a liberal global order. Highly flexible in their strategies, these bankers possessed long-term views of national and global development that engaged overlapping connections among networks, institutions, and the public that privileged the creation of transatlantic spaces for deliberation and socialization among Western economic elites.

Silver coins were an excellent instrument of payment in the seventeenth century, but given its high weight and value, its use and transport involved high risks and costs. Is it possible to estimate those costs? So far, we know how much the Spanish Crown paid to its bankers for money transport, but how much did the bankers themselves pay? And how much did other economic agents pay? What was cheaper: the use of bills of exchange or that of coins? How did the export of precious metals work in Spain?