[6] While writing his thesis, Kindleberger was employed temporarily in the international division of United States Treasury under the direction of Harry Dexter White.

Subsequently, he worked at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland (1939-1940), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1940–1942).

In 1945–1947 he served at the Department of State as Acting Director of the Office of Economic Security Policy, and briefly from 1947-48 as counselor for the European Recovery Program.

The FBI listened to my phone calls and things I said in the course of my work at the State Department and gave gossip and some misrepresentations to columnists like George Sokolsky.

In the preface to The Great Depression 1929-1939, he wrote: "It's the story simply told, without tables of squares..."[7] His book Manias, Panics, and Crashes is still widely used in Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs in the United States.

In the last chapter, "An Explanation of the 1929 Depression", Kindleberger lists the five responsibilities the US would have had to assume in order to stabilize the world economy: Kindleberger was highly skeptical of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's monetarist view of the causes of the Depression, seeing it as too narrow and perhaps dogmatic, and dismisses out of hand what he characterized as Paul Samuelson's "accidental" or "fortuitous" interpretation.

[citation needed] For Kindleberger, the main problem with international institutions is that they provide public goods whose provision states are incentivized to free-ride on.

[19] Following Mancur Olson, Kindleberger argued that the solution to the free-riding problem was to have an actor who was large enough (a hegemon) and willing to bear the cost of cooperation alone.