Corporate reconstructions of federal macroeconomic government institutions compared : USA then, Europe now

Abstract

This paper is a contribution to the comparative historical literature on the development of American and European federal macroeconomic government institutions, spawned by the 2010–12 Eurozone crisis. The literature has two major shortcomings, namely a lack of agreement on relevant periodization and a lack of causal explanations about the sources of the processes being compared. My claim is that the most relevant comparison is between the first half of the twentieth century for the USA and the period beginning in the 1980s for the European Union. The reason for this is the underlying and profound socio-economic process of the corporate reconstruction of American and European capitalisms, which I identify as the root cause of the development of federal macroeconomic government institutions in both polities.