Abstract

ABSTRACT:

This article explores Polish-West German financial relations in the 1970s and 1980s. Engaging with Robert Shiller's idea of narrative economics, it argues that West German lending to socialist Poland was driven by stories that circulated among Frankfurt bankers as Warsaw kept financial information typically used for credit risk assessments secret. The optimistic future of East-West relations that bankers imagined in the atmosphere of 1970s détente created the very real material conditions—mounting hard currency debt in Poland—that forced individuals and institutions to continue cooperating across the Iron Curtain during the resurfacing Cold War tensions of the early 1980s.

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