Dr Daniel McDowell

Daniel McDowell is Maxwell Advisory Board Professor of International Affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center. He is a former Wilson Center China Fellow. As a scholar, McDowell specializes in the study of financial sanctions, the dynamics of international currency competition, and financial crisis management, with an emphasis on the United States and China in these arenas. The author of many peer-reviewed academic articles, he has also written two books including Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar, published by Oxford University Press in 2023. McDowell’s public facing writing has appeared in outlets like Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, War on the Rocks, Le Grande Continent, and numerous other outlets. On the subject of US financial sanctions and de-dollarization, McDowell has been invited to speak at a range of public and private institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Jeffries, State Street Global Advisors, Autonomous Research, World Gold Council, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, the European Money and Finance Forum, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Stimson Center, and the U.S. House of Representatives.

Listen to Dominic Bowen and Dr McDowell unpack how financial sanctions, digital currencies, and geopolitical competition are reshaping the global monetary system, and read our analysis on why dollar dominance is proving resilient, but increasingly constrained, in an era of politicised finance and global risk.