Abstract
Recent scholarship has insisted on conceptualising neoliberalism as a return to hegemony of finance (Duménil and Levy, 2004; Arrighi, 2010; Harvey, 2010). This conceptualisation views finance-driven capitalism as a new phase of accumulation born out of the 1960s-1970s crisis of production, in which the solution to declining profits, the overproduction of goods and falling real wages was found by extending credit in ‘weird and wonderful’ ways to increase overall demand. Indeed, financial liberalisation formed a key pillar of the ‘Washington Consensus’ and informed many of the market-led solutions and policy measures espoused by neoliberal doctrine from the late 1970s onwards (Peck, 2013). The key principles of neoliberalisation have involved the freeing up of capital controls facilitating the unfettered movement of capital across space, the application of market solutions to public goods and a re-articulated role for the state focused on guaranteeing the value of money while vesting private-sec tor actors with greater ‘freedom’ to innovate and act. This chapter examines the transformation under neoliberalism of Irish financial regulation since the 1980s from one of close control over international capital flows to an environment of ‘light-touch’ regulation. The freeing up of controls over capital movement permitted greater inward flows of funds seeking high returns from Irish economic growth of the late 1990s.
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© 2014 Sinéad Kelly
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Kelly, S. (2014). Light-Touch Regulation: The Rise and Fall of the Irish Banking Sector. In: MacLaran, A., Kelly, S. (eds) Neoliberal Urban Policy and the Transformation of the City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377050_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137377050_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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