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The author of this text presents a historically-informed account of the politics of domestic financial liberalization in Spain over the past 25 years. She challenges the widespread assumption that international market forces alone explain domestic reforms in a formerly interventionist state. In Spain, she suggests, domestic elites seized on liberal economic arguments to promote agendas which had less to do with international pressures than with domestic politics. Reform was also driven, Perez contends, by the specific political agenda of a small group of reformers within the central bank. This group's ascendance in Spanish policy-making circles began well before the death of Franco and the transition to democracy. A pattern of accommodation between state elites and private banking, which had characterized Spanish financial regulation from the beginning of this century, persisted through the process of liberalization. Spain is not the only activist state to opt for liberalization, and Perez makes her analysis with an eye to crossnational comparison, notably with the French experience.