3 - Credible Legacies, Neoliberal Transition

Summary

Chapter 3 looks at how contemporary studies of public banks have tended to bypass the historical dynamism of public banks, preferring to see the diverse legacies of public banks through narrow concepts like ‘market failure’ or ‘additionality’. This can impoverish rather than enrich how we think of contemporary public banks and constrain how we imagine their future. This chapter argues that the histories of public banks are more diverse than typically recognised within mainstream economics. Nevertheless, the transition to neoliberalism has tended to narrow the reproductive options for public banks towards more corporatised and marketised logics.