This chapter explains that the Anglo-American origins of the global financial crisis of 2007/8 had a deep historical-institutional lineage, rooted in the transatlantic transformation from the Keynesian order during the early 1980s. This transformation was itself enabled and conditioned by previous processes of postwar Anglo-American development. The continuation of long-term transatlantic financial liberalization and integration dynamics during the 1980s and beyond placed the markets in New York and London at the heart of the institutional infrastructure that transmitted the crisis globally. Anglo-American preeminence within international banking regulation ensured that the global financial system would accommodate the enormous leveraging-up of major banks. Politically, the conversion of both the UK's Labour Party and America's Democratic Party to the virtues of financial deregulation, as well as their acceptance of the epistemic omnipotence of financial markets, laid the basis for the profoundly misplaced complacence that generated economic vulnerability on an enormous scale. Viewing the events of 2007/8 from the perspective of the longue durée of Anglo-American finance allows one to more fully appreciate the role of the nexus between treasuries, central banks, and private bankers on both sides of the Atlantic in producing the crisis.
Regulatory foundations of financialisation: May Day, Big Bang and international banking, 1975–1990