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This dissertation examines the contradictory imperatives of New Deal banking reforms to explore both their notable successes and subsequent erosion. From the perspective of overdeterminist Marxian class analysis, we explore the conflicting objectives of New Dealers as they reflect the logic of a nascent Keynesianism. We argue that the Keynesian project for economic growth and stability required the availability of cheap money capital to promote vigorous investment. However, the provision of money capital on attractive terms can exert downward pressure on the profitability of financial capitalist firms, and commercial banks in particular. The potentially detrimental implications of this agenda on commercial bank profitability was particularly dire given the crisis in commercial banking that prevailed during the great depression. This dilemma obliged New Deal banking reforms to institute a complex pastiche of policies, some of which enhanced and some of which constrained the profitability of commercial banks. We examine certain aspects of New Deal banking legislation, such as the Glass-Steagall Act (which prohibited the blending of commercial banking with other financial capitalist activity such as investment banking), the creation of deposit insurance, and the imposition of interest rate controls, to discern their contradictory implications for commercial bank profitability. In conducting this analysis, the dissertation has applied and extended the class analysis of financial capital provided by overdeterminist Marxism in order to discern the various struggles both among financial capitalists and between productive and financial capital shape the profitability of financial capital. Using this framework, we argue that the success of the New Deal banking reforms in the post-war period initially produced a “pax financus” in which the competitive struggles amongst financial capital were moderated. However, the success of these reforms also produced incentives to undermine the New Deal regulatory framework via a regeneration of competitive struggles among financial capitalists. As these struggles intensified, financial innovations designed to circumvent regulatory restrictions changed the conduct of commercial banking and other financial capitalist activity. As these developments progressed, there has been a resurgence in the diversified financial conglomerates (financial holding companies) reminiscent of those that flourished just prior to the Great Depression.

This dissertation addresses the cause of the U.S. financial crisis of 2007-09. Most existing literature has examined causality from the perspective of market failures in isolated segments of the financial system. In contrast, this dissertation examines the ways in which interactions between various market segments contributed to an increase in financial fragility prior to the crisis. This dissertation begins by distinguishing between two dimensions of fragility which are commonly entangled within the literature. It disentangles these dimensions of fragility by differentiating between fragility relative to an exogenous shock and fragility understood as an unsustainable feedback process. This dissertation then reappraises the securitized banking system as it existed prior to the crisis in light of this distinction by developing a map of the mortgage market credit chain. This map emphasizes the credit flows across multiple links along the chain rather than the risk dispersion properties of any given link. Using this map, this dissertation then develops several empirical models which examine the relationship between each of the links along the mortgage market credit chain. These models examine interactions both between adjacent as well as non-adjacent links along the credit chain. The central empirical finding is that a credit supply shift originated the CDO market in early 2004 which drove an unsustainable credit expansion through its interaction with home price appreciation. In this context this dissertation argues that characterizing home price dynamics over the pre-crisis period as a housing bubble is misleading in the sense that it implies home buyers and their expectations were the central location of an unsustainable feedback process. Rather, home prices are best characterized as having operated as part of a credit bubble centered around feedbacks and expectations in the CDO market. As a result, the crisis can be broadly characterized as the bursting of a credit bubble rather than a housing bubble as is more common.

This dissertation is a comparative study of guilds at a time when the guild system was supposedly in decline. It is not a study of decaying institutions, however, but of successful ones. It compares the structure and function of four guilds--shoemakers, joiners, barbers and millers--in the early decades of the seventeenth century. These guilds represent a cross-section of the small businessmen and artisans of Augsburg and reflect the variety of form and activity that existed in the city. The dissertation is based on archival sources that are largely unknown and untouched. Most important of these are the petitions to the City Council written by or about guildsmen and guilds. These sources allow us to go beyond the tax books and guild regulations that form the principal sources for most guild histories. This study also utilizes these traditional sources, but expands upon them with the petitions to examine how the guilds actually functioned on a daily basis (the four guilds produced fifteen to twenty petitions a month). The petitions are invaluable to the social historian, for they are among the few collections of documents in the pre-modern era that speak with the voice of the common man. The guild system in the seventeenth century was not dead; it was not even ill. Contrary to nearly every pronouncement on early modern guilds, the evidence shows that city, guild and guildsmen generally understood one another and worked well together. The system did not work flawlessly or without friction, but it did function successfully. The success came from the ability of the guilds to adapt to changing circumstances, the ability of the city to concern itself with the minutiae of its business life, and the willingness of the guildsmen to communicate their problems and desires to the government. The guilds were a vital part of the city; they were not excessively conservative, they were not backward, they were not behind the times; rather, they were in close harmony with the urban environment that sustained them.

Recent developments in the Third World have been marked by the increased interventions of states in their respective economies. These developments raise the problem of explaining the causes for, and the dynamics of, such interventions. In the dissertation, I seek to develop a theoretical framework for explaining the economic policies of Third World States (TWS). I first argue that the TWS is a variant of the modern state, but with its structure defined by its own unique constitutive social relations. As a modern state, the TWS seeks to maintain, what I have called, its position of relative sovereignty in society, viz, its claim to being the supreme-rule making institution in society, and its claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of force in society. But as these claims of the state are dependent on the size of, and the state's access to, the social surplus, the economic policies of states are best explained, I argue, by the TWS's need to ensure that these conditions are met. The Third World economy is constituted by different systems of production, and its dynamics is determined by their interaction. I show that this results in specific crises of production that limit the size of the social surplus. Another important determinant of state intervention is thus the political and economic conflicts generated by the unique structure of the Third World economy. I show the validity of the theoretical approach that I develop by using it to analyze and explain the agrarian policies of the Ethiopian state during the 1941-74 period. I explain the measures that the emergent modern state took during this period--measures that dissolved the pre-war tributary system of social production, and advanced both simple commodity and capitalist systems of production--not in terms of the voluntary modernizing projects of state leaders, but in terms of the imperatives that the state faced in establishing its position of relative sovereignty in society.

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