Finding fault lines in long chains of financial information

Abstract

IPE has usefully identified numerous contributors to financial crises. Considerably less attention however has been granted to the roles of financial infrastructures, considered in this special issue as the socio-technical systems enabling basic yet crucial financial functions to be carried out, but that tend to be taken for granted and assumed. This article argues that vulnerabilities in information flows enabled through connections between globally dispersed human actors and non-human objects have shaped the types of events triggering crises, how such periods of instability unfold, and their eventual resolution. Building on insights from actornetwork theory, we illustrate how fault lines in 'long chains' of financial information conditioned three financial earthquakes between the 1980s and the present. Our analysis bridges insights from accounts that tend to separately emphasize material and ideational roots of crises. It also points to the importance of supplementing the stress on quantitative indicators with efforts to identify and address vulnerabilities in the quality of connections between disparate actors and objects that enable or disrupt flows of information facilitating global financial markets.

Infrastructural power: discretion and the dynamics of infrastructure in action

“…Micro-level actors, though often unable to intervene in the initial creation of an infrastructure, creatively repurpose the new material and cultural resources it produces in service of local goals, preferences, and commitments (MacKenzie 2003, Erturk et al 2013, MacKenzie and Pardo-Guerra 2014, MacKenzie and Spears 2014. Coming full circle, this creativity at the micro level can lead to new, unforeseen connections among an infrastructure's components, forming 'long chains' (Campbell-Verduyn et al 2019) that become critical sites for meso-and macro-level intervention (MacKenzie 2017).…”

“…exchanges, telegraph companies, statisticians, regulators, farmers) had to be coordinated smoothly enough so that exchange members could count upon the presence and worth of the information provided. Following STS scholars, we can refer to these integrated relations and coordinated practices across technical, organizational, and social components as 'information infrastructures' (Bowker 2010, Campbell-Verduyn et al 2019.…”

Finance/security infrastructures

“…7-8) for examplecalled the 'plumbing of international financial markets', implying the vital yet banal and theoretically unexciting status of financial infrastructures (emphasis added). Recent contributions to IPE, however, have started to show how financial infrastructures are inscribed with power, and more political than often thought (Best & Walters, 2013;Campbell-Verduyn et al, 2019;Porter, 2014).…”

Why hasn't high-frequency trading swept the board? Shares, sovereign bonds and the politics of market structure

“…While the performativity thesis (one of ANT's offshoots) has been embraced by IPE scholarship (e.g. Braun, 2016;Heimberger and Kapeller, 2017;Lockwood, 2015), barring a few exceptions (notably Campbell-Verduyn et al, 2019) ANT more broadly has thus far eluded sustained engagement. Complementing this article's empirical contribution, we wish to take up recent calls for productive engagement between IPE and ANT (Best and Walters, 2013;Campbell-Verduyn et al, 2019).…”