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Why have governments across Western Europe and North America turned to austerity in the wake of the global economic crisis of 2008? This book argues that this turn to austerity, and the resilience of neoliberal economic policies more generally, stems from the growing influence of state monetary agencies—central banks and treasuries—in the management of the global economy. Through a close analysis of historical documents, this book focuses on the critical decade of the 1960s when the acceleration of global financial transactions overwhelmed the existing institutions of international monetary management. As central banks stepped in to support the international monetary system, policy makers became dependent on monetary officials to stabilize and increasingly unstable global economy. Through case studies of economic policy making in the United States, United Kingdom, and Italy during this period, this book shows how this relationship of dependency gave monetary officials leverage to steer economic policy in the direction of austerity. In addition, this book shows that, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods international monetary system in the 1970s, state monetary agencies worked closely together to construct new international institutions to manage an evermore open, and volatile, global capitalism. While these efforts have not prevented global financial crises, they have further strengthened monetary authorities’ position in the international monetary system and increased their influence over national economic policy making.

Common understandings of money, credit, and banking, rely on notions of efficiency--how well they work in allocating resources and coordinating economic activities. This book, by contrast, focuses on how money, credit, and banking are implicated in conflict. It examines how financial elites in general, and certain bankers in particular, create new financial instruments in order to consolidate and reproduce their wealth over time, turning money into an instrument of exclusion, and couching their practices in ideologies of sound banking. Yet, since the boundaries thus erected create resistance, the book also traces the emergence of rival elites (wildcats) who, by increasing the circulation of existing currencies, or incorporating new actors in financial markets through the production of altogether new instruments, attempt to transgress these boundaries.

This book draws on original fieldwork to provide a comparative analysis of emerging credit card markets in eight countries--the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine, China and Vietnam. The problem of market emergence is posed as analytically distinct from market functioning. Card markets are viewed as being actively constructed, rather than emerging spontaneously and following the US blueprint. The process of market construction involves solving a set of puzzles related to the credit card as a product that is both a means of payment and an instrument of credit. These puzzles are: standardization, information asymmetry, information sharing, market origination and expansion. They were solved differently in each of the countries, and the resulting markets are neither identical to the “Western” blueprint, nor to each other. The book focuses on the trajectories of market development in the eight countries from the moment the first cards were issued to the present time, underscoring both similarities and differences between countries.

Why have some countries gone further than others in adopting market–conforming policies? Although previous studies have highlighted political parties, production regimes, and political institutions, this book points to the varying position of economic experts within the state to explain the persistent differences in economic policies across developed countries. Although economists were key agents of the turn toward the market in public policy, their impact depended crucially on the historical institutionalization of economic expertise within state bureaucracies. Drawing on insights from the sociology of professions and public administration, the book puts forward a novel argument about economists as policy actors. This argument emphasizes on the one hand the historical–institutional preconditions for the influence of economists and on the other hand the analytical and normative resources available to economists in policy making. The argument is explored through a comparative investigation of taxation policy, one of the core areas of market-oriented reform from 1980 onwards. Based on historical evidence and a large number of in–depth interviews with policy–making elites, the book analyzes the actors and institutions that shaped tax policy across a set of small, advanced countries–New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, and Denmark–over the period 1980–2010. This analysis yields surprising conclusions about the driving forces behind market-oriented reform.