Acceso usuarios
Whether financial globalization is both uncontainable and irreversible is a question that warrants serious consideration in this era of international financial crises. While Calomiris and Neal (2013) contend that the phenomenon dates back to the dawn of history and is the “natural order of things,” Bastidon-Gilles et al. (2010) consider it an institutional alternative to the Bretton Woods system.
In this paper, we propose a different reading of the emergence of financial globalization. We marshal historical evidence to demonstrate that financial globalization took its first steps starting from the First Industrial Revolution, was stemmed between the two world wars and during the post-war decades of economic growth known in France as the Trente Glorieuses, and then rose to become a global paradigm in the 1970s following neoliberalism’s return-match victory over state interventionism. It is therefore a political construction and not inevitable.
