How Finance Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Soviet Union

Finance craves certainty, and in the 20^th century few investments were safer for the capitalist world’s bankers than the Communist world’s Soviet Union. In the second half of the 1960s, finance and the Soviet Union started a partnership in a world that began to experience the first sprouts of globalization and financialization. As finance sought to liberate itself from the capital controls and the managed economies of the Western world, this talk will present some evidence from the Soviet archives that point to Soviet collaboration on this same project, starting a decade before their first major victories in the first half of the 1970s.