The pincers of ordinary revenues and debt service closed, as the king had anticipated, in the fall of 1596, at the time of the expiration of the millones. An increase in revenues to deal with the deficit, even if only a temporary extension of the millones, was a must. Faced with the opposition of the Cortes, Philip suspended payments to the bankers in November 1596, after the arrival of a large quantity of silver in the fleet.

Various characters take center stage in this book: the king, his ministers, and prominent bankers like Grimaldo, but throughout history, regardless of place or time, crises have been endured by the general population. The king’s suspension brought the entire credit market, based on interconnected relationships, to a standstill. This chapter gives a voice to the ordinary people who had to suffer this experience. Their grievances have been documented in the archives, with their own names.

Chapter 5 traces the regulatory evolution of shareholder – and more broadly, investor – stewardship in the UK, from early investor-led initiatives to the UK Stewardship Code 2020. It begins with the Institutional Shareholders’ Committee, whose statements between 1991 and 2009 gradually reframed activism as stewardship. It then examines the shift to regulator-led stewardship, marked by the Financial Reporting Council’s first-generation UK Stewardship Code (2010/2012), which aimed to foster a market for engagement but remained rooted in shareholder oversight of listed equities. The chapter next assesses the second-generation code (2020), which moves beyond shareholder engagement towards a broader model of investor stewardship. This redefenition embeds ESG considerations, systemic risk, and sustainable value within a principles-based, narrative-driven regime. The analysis also considers the institutional mechanisms supporting implementation and the code’s influence as a global benchmark. While the UK regime has pushed the regulatory frontier, key tensions persist – particularly around enforcement, the translation of normative goals into practice, and the limits of soft law in governing investor conduct.

Proposals for deploying monetary policy to fight climate change and reduce inequality rely on the use of the nation state’s monetary authority to allocate capital to different parts of the economy. Against those proposals stands the publicly stated commitments of central bankers to avoid ‘allocating credit’ by implementing ‘market-neutral’ policies. A review of the financial empirics of central banks’ market operations shows a historically consistent pattern of using monetary authority to allocate debt and equity capital to different sectors of the economy at critical moments. Legal frameworks impose no effective constraints on that state-guidance of investment and, when necessary, the law of central banking actively facilitates capital allocation in ways that allow policymakers to fight deflation, provide emergency fiscal support, and rescue crisis-stricken parts of the financial sector. Against those empirics, commitments to avoid capital allocation appear as communication strategies rather than descriptions of the reality of central bank operations. Given the position of central banks as statutory public agencies, this creates various types of constitutional problems, notably concerning the protection of liberal property rights from government interference. Understanding these legal, market, and political dynamics provides a principled basis to debate reform proposals regarding the constitutional status and institutional functions of central banks in market economies responding to climate change and destructive inequality.

In an exceptional phenomenon in world history, eleven European countries, among the richest in the world, freely decided to create a monetary union in 1992, doing so during a powerful neoliberal shift. How to explain this, and what connection is there between European monetary integration and neoliberalism? This chapter argues that monetary union cannot be reduced exclusively to its neoliberal dimension, as forging such a union was devised by European leaders before the neoliberal turn, and had numerous justifications including ones more consistent with the solidarity and the community governance of capitalism. While the literature on the history of the European Monetary Union is extensive, additional archival research conducted for this book has shed new light on two neglected factors: the importance of projects for monetary cooperation devised in the 1950s and 1960s within the framework of the EEC (before the neoliberal turn); and the crucial importance of concerted stimulus in 1978, followed by German balance of payment difficulties in 1980–1981, which explain the convergence towards stability-oriented policy.

This chapter presents the Depression of the 1780s as one of, if not the, formative events of the Revolutionary era. The Depression shook Americans’ post-Revolutionary confidence and forced them to make fundamental changes to their economic and political institutions. Contrary to previous interpretations, this chapter argues that the Depression arose from a major contraction of America’s deficient money supply rather than flaws in the real economy. British postwar monetary retrenchment resulted in currency, credit, bills, and notes racing eastward across the Atlantic, leaving American markets devoid of money and halting economic activity. Put simply, the new nation’s financial institutions, if they existed at all, could not defend the American economy against British financial power. The collapsing money supply curtailed transactions, forestalled investment, and produced a deflationary spiral that hit every corner of the American economy. The abatement of British retrenchment and creation of stronger American financial institutions helped ease the crisis, but the Depression revealed the profound vulnerability of the Confederation’s fragmented economic system.

Housing is a defining issue of our time, driving a persistent affordability crisis, financial instability, and economic inequality. Through the Roof examines the crucial role of the state in shaping the housing markets of two economic powerhouses – the United States and Germany. The book starts with a puzzle: Free-market America has vigorously supported homeownership markets with generous government programs, while social-market Germany has slashed policy support for both homeownership and rental markets throughout the past century. The book explains why the two nations have adopted such radically different and unexpected housing policy approaches. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews with policymakers, it argues that contrasting forms of capitalism – demand-led in the United States and export-oriented in Germany – resulted in divergent housing policies. In both countries, these policies have subsequently transformed capitalism itself.

Chapter 8 emphasises that the transition to financialised banking was no easy shift and only saw exceptional profits for a limited amount of time for European banks, if compared to US banks. This challenges accounts of financialisation that see the transition to US investment banking as a straightforward shift towards higher profits compelled by securities markets. The chapter documents the problems and contradictions that banks experienced internally and externally, and the resistance of Deutsche Bankers to the practices of liability management (LM) as they experienced losses of their traditional power and autonomy over banking practices. This chapter thus shows how unlikely it was initially for Deutsche to transform so thoroughly towards US finance. It argues that LM is better understood as a necessity to accommodate the higher costs, risks and logics of banking in US money markets. While the financial calamity of 2008 propelled a rethink of Deutsche’s path, financialised banking is not easily reversed, and German banks continue to struggle with the need to raise USD funding. As such, we should worry about banks’ USD funding gap as key source of vulnerability and risk. While a few select US banks have excelled in mastering LM as a powerful technique to flexibly (mis-) match their balance sheets, everyone else suffers from the fallout of the relentless near crisis mode of global finance.

This chapter maps out the trajectory of British postmodern fiction in three specific phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a second phase notable for a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period in the early twenty-first century, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered critically oppositional. In identifying these phases, the chapter departs from Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism and is therefore completely unable to generate any effective criticism of the dominant ideology of global capitalist societies and shows that at its height British postmodern fiction constituted a genuinely critical form of writing with regard to that ideology.