The fall and rise of financial capital

In an effort to protect a rapidly eroding international payments accounts balance, American policy makers pursued a capital controls program through much of the 1960s, contrary to the interests of private finance. How can we explain this outcome when, through much of the postwar period, private finance appears to have been well served by the state's foreign and domestic economic policy? This paper argues that, in responding to international pressure to bring its international payments account into balance, American state elites pursued a conservative Keynesian growth agenda that reconfigured the relationship between the American executive and central bank, which dramatically increased the state's autonomy from the influence of private financial interests. This paper therefore takes up the question of state autonomy and offers a new interpretation of the transition to neoliberal global financial structures from the Bretton Woods system of international monetary relations.