Post-Sovereign Money Creation: The Origins of Shadow Banking and Offshore Finance 25 views

This dissertation analyzes how modern dollar credit markets emerged through state and market power relations. It develops a theory of symbolic arbitrage to describe the strategies deployed by state and market actors to exploit gaps between financial practices and their legal representations, jurisdictional locations, and institutional routings. Through comparative and genealogical analysis of the origins of repurchase agreements, Eurodollars and Eurobonds, and asset backed commercial paper from the 1940s through the 1980s, it shows: (1) how the Federal Reserve supported government borrowing through private dealers while preserving the image of market based Treasury finance; (2) how the British strategy of currency separation and the American strategy of dollar externalization converged in the creation of offshore markets where dollar credit expanded within the dollar system but outside U.S. regulatory jurisdiction; and (3) how fragmented policymaking weakened regulators’ discretionary power to relate rules to practice, allowing commercial banks to reclassify lending and borrowing as nonbanking activity through legal engineering. Under conditions in which no single institution is sovereign, symbolic arbitrage enables actors to lower legitimation, regulatory, and legal costs while shifting costs onto others.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Sociology of Money; Financial Regulation; Repurchase Agreements; Eurodollar Market; Offshore Finance; Shadow Banking; Asset-Backed Commercial Paper; Money Creation; State–Market Relations; Symbolic Arbitrage; Economic Sociology; Comparative Historical Sociology; Political Sociology; Political Economy; International Political Economy

English

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2026-07-21