This article explores competing definitions of equality embedded in contending visions for regional finance in the Americas. The U.S. free market-oriented project envisions extension of a NAFTA-like regulatory framework hemispherewide, promising Latin Americans better financial services, credit, and investment in exchange for strong financial property protections and (implicitly) dramatically reduced financial policy autonomy for their governments. Venezuela's vision of "Bolivarian" finance, exported to the Caribbean and the upper Andes, promotes assertive state management of both foreign and domestic investors, populist redistribution, and increasing reliance on nonmarket financial transactions. Brazil's regional financial project would unite South America through continentwide physical infrastructure and capitalist financial markets while retaining a role for public sector banks responsive to central government priorities. Brazil's approach shares with Venezuela's an emphasis on governments' need for financial policy authority and with the U.S. approach a concern for regulatory predictability and financial deepening. E quality is not typically a term associated with competing designs for financial architecture. Yet contrasting understandings of what is needed to improve the set of rules governing the safeguarding of savings and provision of credit almost always involve implicit or explicit conceptualizations of equity and justice. This article investigates the underlying views on how to achieve greater equality found in three competing regional financial projects in the Americas, associated respectively with the United States, Venezuela, and Brazil. It traces the practical policy relevance of alternative moral arguments (or rationalizations) that undergird international public policymaking even in a technically sophisticated issue arena.The article begins with three distinct literatures that inform the study. Section 1 reviews contrasting ways that the ideas of "equality" and "finance" are linked in contemporary debates worldwide. Section 2 turns to international relations theory to develop the concept of a would-be leader state's "international political-economic project," identifying three such at present in the Western Hemisphere. The third section provides a snapshot of the financial architectures of the nine largest countries in the Americas and their international links. Sections 4 through 6 then demonstrate