I am interested in the intersecting roles played by finance and politics in shaping economic life . Consequently, my research has tended to revolve around periods of economic change, uncertainty, and crisis.
My dissertation investigates the resurgence of foreign lending in the US commercial banking sector throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, and the role of this lending in instigating the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. My project asks how policy and business decisions made leading up to and during the debt crisis facilitated the emergence of the “Washington Consensus” on appropriate political economic reforms for nations in the Global South. I am interested in how much of a consensus the Washington Consensus actually was, as opposed to a paradigm that was created piecemeal over time with the aim of preserving stability in international financial markets.