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The interactions between finance, society, culture and the economy have been key preoccupations of Cassis's work across his career. In the early 1980s, as observers began to identify the second globalisation, Cassis (1984/1994) began to explore the development of London as an international financial centre during the era of the first globalisation in the late nineteenth century. He then expanded his scope to the continental European financial centres throughout the twentieth century (Cassis 1991; Cassis and Telesca 2018). In so doing he focused on the culture of international banking as well as the regulatory and institutional frameworks. This article follows in this tradition by addressing the cultural as well as regulatory aspects of conglomeration in the second great globalisation in the late twentieth century.
In the 1980s the structure of international banking and finance changed profoundly in interlinked processes later dubbed financialisation and globalisation. These concepts both remain somewhat fuzzy, crossing sociology and politics as well as economics. Financialisation is used here to describe the economic tilt towards financial markets in terms of size, diversity, compensation and innovation. Thus, the proliferation of financial products and trading, the rising importance of the activities of banks and non-bank financial firms relative to the economies in which they operated, and the spread of financial activity to non-financial firms are characteristics of financialisation (Krippner 2011; Lin and Tomaskovic-Devey 2013; Epstein 2018; Roy and Willett 2018). The definition of globalisation is also highly contested and can be discipline specific (Robinson 2004), but at its simplest it reflects a commonality of influences across a broad geographic scope, created by the integration of markets and societies through ever faster information technologies and communications. By the early 1990s, Helleiner (1994, p. 295) remarked that finance was ‘the sector of the world economy where “globalization” is most developed’, reflecting not only the size of cross-border financial flows but also the simultaneity and constancy of markets connected through ICT. Predictions of the demise of the nation state due to financial globalisation have not been fulfilled, but deregulation and regulatory competition was certainly a facilitating factor for both of these processes. Financial globalisation changed the relationship between states and financial markets, with profound effects on the structure of international banking and the nature of international financial...