Conclusion

This chapter reiterates the key arguments and findings of the book. The British state pursued financial liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s in an attempt to reconcile the demands of domestic civil society with the suffocating, impersonal pressures of the global economic crisis on Britain’s balances with the rest of the world. Financialization was an accidental result, not an intended outcome. In addition, this chapter explores how the four liberalizations examined here impacted upon the trajectory of financialization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Britain’s liberalization of its financial sector boosted global capital mobility, and thus created powerful pressures on other states to follow suit, contributing to a dynamic of competitive deregulation that spread around the world. Further, the arm’s-length, depoliticized design of the 1986 FSA generated an institutional path dependency, whereby future British systems of financial governance would take a similarly light-touch form. This meant that London would incubate a series of banking scandals in the 1990s, as well as being home to some of the riskiest financial practices exposed by the 2008 crisis. Finally, the growing financial flows unleashed by the liberalizations of the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly channelled into the housing market, resulting in Britain’s particular dynamic of housing-centric financialization.