ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the financial system has been treated by the Hall-Soskice inspired Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) approach. The concept of VoC has challenged mainstream economics by a differentiated view of capitalist economies. As the VoC literature regards the end result of this process as the essence of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, it is not able to recognize the dynamic resulting from changed world market constellations. Hall and Soskice distinguish between the ideal forms of Liberal Market Economies (LME) and Coordinated Market Economies (CME) by their respectively high degrees of complementarities depending on whether they are predominantly affected by market-based or non-market coordination. However, from a cultural political economy perspective the approach comes with some fundamental limitations that are mainly the result of its reductionist way of making sense of the complex, dynamic interactions among territorially defined economic spaces.
