This chapter explains how contributors use Susan Strange's rich conceptual framework to explore the financial crisis and its aftermath, and reflect critically on broader contributions which her work has made to the discipline of international political economy (IPE). Susan Strange's life and times spanned the most tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. Susan Strange spent much of her academic career lamenting and cataloguing the serial failure of scholarship in political science, international relations and international economics to understand how the world and its political economy had changed or was in the process of changing. The global demand for American credit during the financial crisis both fed off and reinforced the pre-existing American capacity to generate and deploy the financial resources. The Strange was an inveterate optimist that things on the ground could be improved upon, if only analysis was sound and the determination to act was both robustly held and appropriately grounded in sustainable values that were widely shared.