Samuel Knafo’s The Making of Modern Finance is a thoroughly compelling historically-grounded interrogation of liberal financial governance. I should qualify straight away that I am no expert on financial governance, the gold standard or the history of central banking. Nonetheless, there was [...]
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Samuel Knafo aims at a difficult target in his splendid new book, The Making of Modern Finance. His goal is to demolish the almost intractable assumption so frequently attached to liberal financial governance – the notion that the state is essentially a reactive actor, one that [...]
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Let me start this piece on Samuel Knafo’s The Making of Modern Finance: Liberal Governance and the Gold Standard with a disclaimer: it makes no claims to neutrality or objectivity. I have witnessed the book’s development up close since approximately the turn of the century, when Sam and I [...]
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By most measures, liberal states are interventionist states. Their expenditures are large and they regulate more and more of our lives. Most critical scholars recognise this. Scholars now commonly open discussions of liberalism or neoliberalism by confidently affirming that liberal or [...]
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