Leon Wansleben, "The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism" (Harvard UP, 2023)

Mar 23, 2023

"The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism" podcast features Leon Wansleben, an expert on central banks. Wansleben discusses the origins and consequences of central banks' increasing influence. He compares developments in the US, the UK, Germany, and Switzerland, emphasizing the policy innovations of central bankers. The podcast explores the impact of central banks on financial systems, the role of neoliberalism, and the empowerment of central banks through policy techniques.

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Understanding the Practices of Traders and the Role of the State

02:11 • 11min

Comparing the Current Inflation Crisis with the 1970s

13:32 • 2min

Keynesianism, Neoliberalism, and the Role of Central Banks

15:44 • 16min

Analyzing Margaret Thatcher's Program Against Inflation and the Rise of the Bank of England's Political Power

31:39 • 5min

The Empowerment of Central Banks through Policy Techniques

37:02 • 23min

While central banks have gained remarkable influence over the past fifty years, promising more stability, global finance has gone from crisis to crisis. How do we explain this development? Drawing on original sources ignored in previous research, The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2023) offers a groundbreaking account of the origins and consequences of central banks' increasing clout over economic policy.

Many commentators argue that ideas drove change, indicating a shift in the 1970s from Keynesianism to monetarism, concerned with controlling inflation. Others point to the stagflation crises, which put capitalists and workers at loggerheads. Capitalists won, the story goes, then pushed deregulation and disinflation by redistributing power from elected governments to markets and central banks. Both approaches are helpful, but they share a weakness. Abstracting from the evolving practices of central banking, they provide inaccurate accounts of recent policy changes and fail to explain how we arrived at the current era of easy money and excessive finance.

By comparing developments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Switzerland, Leon Wansleben finds that central bankers' own policy innovations were an important ingredient of change. These innovations allowed central bankers to use privileged relationships with expanding financial markets to govern the economy. But by relying on markets, central banks fostered excessive credit growth and cultivated an unsustainable version of capitalism. Through extensive archival work and numerous interviews, Wansleben sheds new light on the agency of bureaucrats and calls upon society and elected leaders to direct these actors' efforts to more progressive goals.

Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics