Liquidity Lost: The Governance of the Global Financial Crisis

ISBN-13: 9780199683789 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 256 str.

Paul Langley

Opis

The interventions of crisis management during the 2007 to 2011 financial crisis were not simply responses to a set of given developments in markets, banking or neo-liberal capitalism. Nor can those interventions be adequately explained as the actions of sovereign state officials and institutions. Instead, Langley argues, processes of crisis governance are shown to have established six principal technical problems to be acted upon: liquidity, toxicity, solvency, risk, regulation, and debt and that the governance of these technical problems, is shown to have been strategically assembled in order to secure the continuation of a particular, financialized way of life that depends upon global financial circulations.
Contributing to interdisciplinary debates in cultural economy and the social studies of finance, and grounded in extensive empirical research, this book offers an innovative analysis of how the contemporary global financial crisis was governed. Through an exploration of the interventions made by central banks, treasuries, and regulatory authorities in the Anglo-American heartland of the crisis between 2007 and 2011, experimental and strategic apparatuses of crisis governance are shown to have emerged. These discrete apparatuses established the six technical problems to be acted upon, but also shared certain proclivities and preferences. Crisis governance assembled discourses and devices of economy in relation with sovereign monetary, fiscal, and regulatory techniques, and elicited an affective atmosphere of confidence. It also sought to secure the financialized way of life which turns on the opportunities ostensibly afforded by uncertain financial circulations, and gave rise to post-crisis technical fixes designed to advance the resilience of banking and the macro-prudential regulation of financial stability. Thus, the consensus that prevails across economics, political economy, and beyond - wherein sovereign state institutions are cast as coming to the rescue of the markets, banking, or neo-liberal capitalism - conceals a great deal more than it reveals about the governance of the global financial crisis.

Recenzje

If you wonder, like everyone does, why the most severe financial crisis in living memory has not produced a fundamental change in the way we regulate economies and understand the role of banks, read this book. Drawing on an original reading of Deleuzes notions of modulation and mitigation, Langley shows in an empirically detailed manner how crisis response was driven by ad-hoc initiatives, minor modulations and sometimes conflicting approaches that were largely oriented toward rebuilding affective atmospheres of trust. Steering away from grand conceptions of neoliberalism, Langleys attentiveness to the situated contingency of crisis management brings the politics back into our understanding of financial regulation.

O autorze

Paul Langley is Reader in Economic Geography at the Department of Geography, Durham University, UK. He has published extensively on many aspects of global finance, and is the author of two previous books: The Everyday Life of Global Finance (Oxford University Press, 2008); and World Financial Orders (Routledge, 2002).