Chapter 4 situates the beginnings of extroverted financialisation at the time when US banks started to dominate the Eurodollar markets from the 1960s onwards. The Euromarkets are an important turning point for financialisation, but their impacts on European finance are rarely examined. During this time, however, German banks had their first contact with new US innovations, which fundamentally links the German post-WWII political economy with global offshore markets, significantly before the 1990s, when many accounts date the impact of financial globalisation. Identifying a gap of international funding for its developing export sector, this chapter shows that the making of the German coordinated market economy was already bound up with global financial markets. Tracing the financial innovations of German banks, this chapter argues that the transformative impact of US finance is not market expansion or regulatory evasion by going offshore per se. Instead, financialisation has posed distinct imperatives in relation to the rise of liability management that induced a qualitative change. Liability management fundamentally differs from the German banks’ original international strategies, which drove the banks' turn to the Eurodollar markets in order to meet the US challenge.

This chapter examines the birth control survey research conducted by population technocrats c.1947–60, and analyzes how this research resonated with government efforts to manage the emerging problem of “overpopulation” via fertility regulation. Focusing on the leading population technocrat Shinozaki Nobuo, this chapter depicts how human agency participated in the at times precarious relationship between policy and practice. It also shows how the epistemological framework inscribed in the scientific knowledge produced by the survey research, harmonized with the economic and political rationale that buttressed the post-WWII state’s reconstruction efforts. To illustrate this point, the chapter examines: (1) the evident absence of the category of race and (2) the categorization of data by region and the research participants’ socioeconomic status. For (1), it contends that, by maintaining silence on the question of race, the research consolidated an image of Japan’s population as ethnically homogeneous, which was becoming increasingly dominant political discourse during this period. The phenomenon (2), I argue, embodied the burgeoning developmentalist logic that explicitly portrayed reproductive practices in terms of a nation’s socioeconomic achievement. Together, these phenomena served to produce a certain knowledge of the Japanese population that was particularly compatible with post-WWII Japan’s reconstruction efforts.