Walter Wriston and the Hegemonic Project of Neoliberal Finance, 1967-1984

Conrad Jacober, Johns Hopkins University

Henry Kaufman, the Salomon Brothers economist better known as Dr. Doom, wrote in 2016 that, “By the 1960s, managers and owners who had dominated during the Great Depression were retired or fired, giving way to a new generation of financial leaders. Within that generation, the most dominant banker was Walter Wriston of Citibank. More than any other figure, Wriston—as CEO of one of the world’s largest financial institutions from 1967 to 1984—pushed the boundaries of American banking. No one, thus far, has been his equal.” Despite his epochal role in the transformation of American finance at the origin of the neoliberal era, Wriston has received little scholarly attention. This is all the more puzzling given that, in addition to his outsized role as the head of Citibank, Wriston co-chaired the Business Roundtable and chaired Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board. Based on a previously unprocessed collection of all 311 of Walter Wriston’s speeches and testimonies as the head of Citibank, I show how Wriston emerged as American finance’s foremost intellectual and leading proponent of neoliberalism. I argue that Wriston’s neoliberal project developed out of interindustry struggles between fractions of finance capital that were hemmed in by New Deal banking regulations and those that benefitted from them. I trace the development of Wriston’s hegemonic struggle to organize American finance around a shared project of financial deregulation and the creation of a globalized, universal financial services industry, one which he aptly described as “part management philosophy and part the temper of the times.” Wriston’s neoliberal project developed from the practical concerns of bank management and interindustry conflict, a path of development that has received less attention among scholars of free market intellectuals and neoliberal state experts.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 66. Neoliberalism and Class Politics