Capital Rules

The Construction of Global Finance

Rawi Abdelal

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674034556
  9780674023697
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674261303
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Listen to a short interview with Rawi AbdelalHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy.

In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s--trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies--had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier.

How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, "managed" globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Orthodoxy and Heresy
• 2 The Rules of Global Finance: Causes and Consequences
• 3 Capital Ruled: Embedded Liberalism and the Regulation of Finance
• 4 The Paris Consensus: European Unification and the Freedom of Capital
• 5 Privilege and Obligation: The OECD and Its Code of Liberalization
• 6 Freedom and Its Risks: The IMF and the Capital Account
• 7 A Common Language of Risk: Credit-Rating Agencies and Sovereigns
• 8 The Rebirth of Doubt
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: List of Archives and Interviewees
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index