The pre-1980 roots of neoliberal financial deregulation

U.S. financial deregulation is often popularly presented as a fundamental attack on financial regulation that began with neoliberalism's Big Bang in 1980. This paper argues this position is wrong in two ways. First, it is a process that stretches back decades before 1980. Textbook mentions of 1970s precursor 'financial innovations' fall far short of presenting the breadth and duration of the pre-1980 attack on the system of regulation. Second, it has not been an across-the-board attack on financial regulation in the name of market efficiency as required by its ideology and claimed by its advocates, but rather a focused attack on only one of the five pillars of the system of regulation. This paper develops both of these assertions through a presentation of the five central pillars of the pre-1980 system of financial regulation, and the four major attacks on the three different aspects of the restrictions on financial competition. Keywords. financial competition, financial deregulation, financial regulation, neoliberalism JEL Classification Codes: N22, G21, G28
Financial deregulation in the United States, as a particularly important aspect of economic deregulation there in general, sharply accelerated following the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the associated [...]