The paper examines the policy-communities/policy-networks debate within Public Policy studies; most specifically in light of the present financial crisis. It argues that in spite of a series of highly fruitful, detailed accounts of public policy processes, analyses of economic interest group participation remain limited by their lack of engagement with more fundamental questions about financial expansion. Further, the undertheorisation of the interplay between structure and agent, material and ideational elements of financial market integration suggests the fine, detailed analysis of the 'communities-networks' debates is somewhat two-dimensional. The paper briefly considers the insights of cultural economics on 'financialisation' in response to these concerns. In turn, the paper argues for the utility of a Gramscian historical materialist analysis, capable of theorising both the structural tendencies and pressures under capitalism with the ideological elements of class struggle, thereby providing a critical engagement with the social content of financial market reform. The empirical crux of the paper though is focused on showing what a Gramscian account of financial market integration reveals. Here, the disciplining processes internal to financial trade associations and strategically employed discourses vis-à-vis state agencies, contextualised against the expansionary impulsions of capitalism, reveal the dynamics of the hegemonic struggles of transnationally oriented fractions of capital otherwise obfuscated by Public Policy studies.