Mareike Beck’s research while affiliated with The London College and other places

Deutsche Bank was once an acclaimed US-style investment bank but is now struggling. The rise of US finance is often explained as an outcome of financial liberalization that motivated other banks to abandon their traditional industrial support to chase profit opportunities within global securities markets. This story, however, underestimates how the transition to US-led financialization was deeply entangled with managerial struggles and the contradictions of adopting US financial innovations from a peripheral position. By contrast, I use the concept of extroverted financialization to portray Deutsche Bank’s transformation as an outcome of its attempts to integrate new funding practices connected to US money markets, called liability management. I argue that this process generated a difficult-to-manage business model and, ultimately, Deutsche’s decline. Because of these extroverted strategies, the bank is now caught between opposing logics of banking, within neither of which it can regain its previous powerful position.

This paper reconceptualizes the impact of US finance on European banking as a process of ‘extroverted financialisation’. This impact is commonly associated with the rise of ‘market-based banking’ (MBB). While MBB exposes how commercial banking has been deeply transformed by disintermediation and borrowing from wholesale markets, the concept struggles to capture the distinct imperatives of this process, and its uneven nature. By contrast, the concept of extroverted financialization captures the problems European banks have faced while adapting to US-led financialization. More specifically, the concept portrays the financialization of European banking as an outcome of new funding practices, called liability management (LM), developed in US money markets from the 1960s onwards. I show how this put pressures on European lenders because it allowed US banks to leverage extensively. To catch up, European banks had to improve their access to liquid USD, which forced them to find a way into the Eurodollar markets and into the US money markets. To operate in these markets, they had to gradually implement the practices of LM. This process of extroversion made their own banking models highly fragile and dependent on US money market funding. Despite adopting LM, they could not reduce their structural disadvantages vis-à-vis US banks.