This dissertation examines how congressional and private sector decision makers of the 1980s understood financial production, and how this understanding shaped policy. The years between 1980 and 2008 have been defined as the “Neoliberal Order.” My analysis does not challenge this categorization. However, I aim to refocus the point of rupture from political to economic—from the election of Ronald Reagan to the Volcker Shock. Financialization remade how the economy functioned, constraining what was previously thought possible while also creating unintended consequences to political decision making. Placing this dramatic economic shift, rather than political, at the center of rupture opens a new path of analysis. Primarily, this project illuminates how confused, chaotic, and contingent the transformation of the political economy during the 1980s was. Despite the perceived success of the Reagan Revolution, the chapters ahead illustrate how there truly was no master plan. Important legislative actions, from tax reform to deregulating the savings and loan industry, were reactions to quickly changing circumstances that were beyond the direct control—and most importantly, the understanding—of decision makers. Despite the chaos, a new logic emerged. Financiers were recognized as wealth creators, who gave new life to the moribund economy, leading the way for economic growth and prosperity into the coming decades. I argue that even as financialization wrought a new type of capitalism, older cultural narratives framed understandings of how to formulate and implement policy. Specifically, the virtuous producer ideal continued to shape political imaginations for problem-solving in this new economic era. Finance capitalism required a reworking of the political and cultural imagination to not only what production was, but also who produced wealth and what were the new productive uses of capital. The cultural narrative of virtuous production allowed for the concretized understanding of the political economy in a time of fracture. After the Volcker Shock, American financial markets became the home to unprecedented foreign investment, creating a type of financial monopoly power—and thus economic growth—that replaced industrial manufacturing. By the end of the 1980s, financial institutions that provided credit and created speculative markets were recognized as the new engines of growth. Financiers representing the supply side of the economy were thus labeled the virtuous producer of the new era. The Reagan Revolution, and the following Neoliberal Order, were shaped by this new paradigm. Although the supply-side revolution, and attenuating economic instability and inequality, correlate with the transition, the political imaginings of the Reagan right were not the center of change. Rather the Volcker Shock created a new economic paradigm that ushered in the transition from industrial to financial production. Congressional action to multiple crises caused by this transformation throughout the Reagan presidency spurred the transformation of the virtuous producer ideal to support the supply side of the economy. This new framework allows us to understand how a new type of conventional wisdom emerged from an era defined by chaos and misunderstanding. The virtuous producer remained at the heart of the American political economy.