Extroverted Financialization offers a new account of the Americanization of global finance through the concept of 'extroverted financialization'. The study presents German banks as active participants of financialization, demonstrating how deeply entangled they were with global markets since post-WWII reconstruction. Extroverted Financialization locates the transformation of global banking within the revolution of funding practices in 1960s New York and shows how this empowered US banks to systematically outcompete their European counterparts. This uneven competition drove German banks to partially uproot themselves from their own home markets and transform their own banking models into US financial models. This transformation not only led to the German banks' speculative investments during the 2000s subprime mortgage bubble, but more importantly to rising USD dependency and their contemporary decline.

‘A fantastic achievement. Mareike Beck establishes herself as a central voice in the debate about changing European banking practices in response to the liability management funding techniques favoured by American banks since the 1960s. This is a carefully crafted book awash with subtle insights and crammed full of rich empirical detail. It significantly rewrites the received history of how German banks reconstituted themselves in a desperate attempt to avoid being left behind.'

Matthew Watson - University of Warwick

‘Mareike beck overturns the conventional wisdom about European and specifically German finance, showing that German banks internationalized well before the nominal end of the Bretton Woods System, and that the cozy hausbank story in much of comparative political economy is overstated.'

Herman Mark Schwartz - University of Virginia