Global Finance and Macroeconomic Policy

A shift away from the Keynesian, welfare-state interventionist era towards a neoliberal, market-based disciplinary order in economic policy has been taken place the last decades. This shift could be attributed to key social, political and institutional changes, which have eroded the foundations of the post-war international economic order, shaped by the Bretton Woods monetary system, and caused the formation of a new, global, financial structure of power. The revival of global finance reinforces the deflationary bias of fiscal and monetary policy and reduces the viability of relatively expansionary policies. The aim of this paper is to consider the contribution of the revival of global finance to the resurrection of neo-classical ?orthodoxy? in current economy policy making. Based on a growing body of literature in the field of International Political Economy, it attempts to develop a political economy framework to consider the way the ?orthodox? deflationary discipline that this global, financial structure of power imposes on macroeconomic policy and especially of monetary policy works under certain conditions.