Financial underpinnings of Europe’s financial crisis. Liberalization, integration, and asymmetric state power

Summary:

This book analyzes how financial liberalization affected the development of the financial crisis in Europe, with particular attention given to the ways in which power asymmetries within Western Europe facilitated financial liberalization and distributed the costs and gains from it. The author combines institutional narrative analysis with empirical surveys and econometrics, as well as country-level studies of financial liberalization and its consequences before and after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis.

The book charts institutional liberalization and privatization of European finance from the 1960s onward and presents a survey of descriptive statistics that shows how different financial stability, financial flow and macroeconomic variables have changed in Western Europe since the early 1980s, generally increasing financial and economic instability. It also demonstrates the change in securitization, and European banks’ tendencies to hold securitized assets on their balance sheets.

The book creates a framework for understanding the power dynamics between national, industrial, and class interests in Western Europe that promoted secular financial liberalization as well as the institutional design of the EMU that mandated financial liberalization. Finally, it examines the process of financial liberalization in detail in three states: Iceland, Ireland, and Germany.

Contents:

1. Introduction
2. European financial liberalization since World War II
3. Empirical trends in European finance
4. Financial liberalization and the onset of financial crisis in Western Europe between 1983 and 2011
5. A political economy of European financial integration
6. German financialization, the global financial crisis, and the eurozone crisis
7. Icelandic and Irish financial liberalization, crisis, and aftermath
8. Conclusion