The conclusion summarises the book and reflects on what is at stake in reconceptualising the transformation of European banking as extroverted financialisation. It contemplates recent financial endeavours to ‘improve’ our global financial architecture and finds most somewhat lacking in their ability to introduce a global financial system that serves social rather than financial ends. In fact, missing the implications of EF, some of these endeavours have the potential to worsen, rather than improve, the threats of credit crunches and crises. Alternatively, we might be better off to consider more radical solutions that tackle the very nature of USD debt creation and the financial architecture itself.

Chapter 2 challenges three conceptions that dominate political economy accounts of financialisation: (a) that financialisation is best understood as a process of marketisation; (b) that financial systems transform in response to external drivers (i.e., marketisation) as ‘national varieties’ conceptually outside the global economy; and (c) that German finance is best conceptualised as a bank-based system which transformed into a hybrid from the 1990s onwards. Critically analysing the debate about the Americanisation of global finance, this chapter shows that the concept of marketisation captures the expansion of markets but struggles to identify fundamental transformations within markets themselves. As a result, political economy scholars rarely study banks in their own rights and underestimate the power and weaknesses of banks as agents of financialisation. Instead, this chapter introduces the theoretical building blocks of the concept of extroverted financialisation, which frames the analysis of the book. EF has four features that each represent a new imperative in global markets for European banks and that have shaped their responses to the rise of US finance: (a) the rise of liability management; (b) the need for USD; (c) the institutional specificity of US money markets; and (d) the contradictions of contemporary banking.

Why have European banks embarked on a radical transformation in which they became deeply dependent on US financial markets, a relationship they are ill-equipped to manage and less likely to overcome? This chapter introduces and summarises the book. It outlines the debates about the Americanisation of global finance and presents the concept of extroverted financialisation to help explain US-led financialisation outside the US.