From the Publisher
“Visions of Financial Order guides the reader through over two centuries of banking regulations, examining the turning points that made US, Canadian, and Spanish national banking regimes into what they are today. Pernell's bold research offers fresh insight into how culture shapes economic life in ways that are indelibly influenced by contingency, conflict, and crisis. Elegantly written and argued, this important book is as useful for understanding financial regulation today as it is for comprehending our economic and political past.”—Sarah Quinn, author of American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation“This book takes an innovative approach to financial sector regulation, offering an ambitious comparative-historical perspective organized around the proposition that each country has dual institutional cultural frames, which are activated during moments of regulation as contending cultural arguments.”—Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, University of Massachusetts, Amherst“An impressive achievement. There is a voluminous social science literature on financial (de)regulation, but I know of no other work which analyzes regulatory regimes with this level of historical depth and comparative breadth. Pernell solves the exceptionally difficult analytical puzzle of how to explain cross-national trajectories of financial regulation with an original and quite powerful theory based on the idea of contending visions of economic order.”—Adam Goldstein, Princeton University
