The Road to Financialization in Central and Eastern Europe: The Early Policies and Politics of Stabilizing Transition

Narratives of macroeconomic stabilization played an important part in the financialization of the formerly planned economies. The excess demand narrative, one of the least contested ‘problems’ of post-socialist transformation, shaped central banks' liquidity policies and thus translated the priorities of financialized capitalism into policy goals and practices. The paper challenges the boundaries of the debates on post-socialist economic developments, contextualizes the representation of the stabilization ‘problem’ in those debates and reinterprets them from the standpoint of financialization. If the excess demand narrative is treated as a contested account of the stabilization ‘imperative’, its role as catalyst for the financialization of the banking sector and the shift to impatient finance becomes apparent. An alternative approach to stabilization is further outlined, drawing on institutionalist conceptualizations of the role of money in capitalist production.