Geographies of finance III

Abstract

We are now not far short of a decade on from the start of the global financial crisis. By most reckonings, those regions most directly affected by the crisis, and most people living therein, are still struggling to recover from and to come to terms with that crisis. But there already exists a burgeoning literature on the next great financial crisis: on, that is to say, what has -or, more pointedly, has not -been done to prevent such a reoccurrence, to limit its likelihood, or to restrict its potential scope. This literature, and in particular its discussion of financial (re)regulation, is the subject of this article. Through a critical reading of the literature the article argues that positive (re)regulation has been inhibited by the power of the financial sector to stymie meaningful reform, and that this power assumes highly material geographical configurations. The article also emphasizes the profound influence of economic ideas on financial policy-making. One idea that perhaps needs thorough critical reconsideration, the article concludes, is that of financial regulation itself.

A double-edged sword: The conditional properties of elite network ties in the financial sector

“…A range of scholarship has investigated the myriad ways the global financial crisis altered the organization of financial activity and regulatory authority (Christophers, 2016; Wójcik et al, 2019). We applied a new network closeness measure to specific outcomes of substantial relevance to the political economy of financial regulation, before, during and after financial crisis of 2008−2009.…”

Problems of past anticipations of the future: The case of medical manpower

“…It is therefore no longer true to say, as Anderson argued over a decade ago, that ‘human geography has rarely explicitly engaged with the future’ (2010, p. 778). Indeed, conceptual and empirical concern with ‘futures’ now animates significant amounts of geographical research—from ‘feminist futures’ (MacLeavy et al., 2021) to ‘financial futures’ (Christophers, 2016)—with a particular focus on how ‘time and temporality modulate space’ (Ho, 2021, p. 1669).…”

How financial products organize spatial networks: Analyzing collateralized debt obligations and collateralized loan obligations as “networked products”

“…Consequently, the spatial networks formed depend not only on the location of skill clusters but also the regulatory environment and the opportunities to lower costs or arbitrage rules which are central to what Haberly et al (2019) term the “paper geographies” of finance. Whilst the need to lower costs, for example, provides sourcing advantages for actors based in low-tax jurisdictions over others (Christophers, 2014; Fleischer, 2010), the wider legal regime—whether contracts are written in English law for example—may also create strong incentives to locate other activities in a jurisdiction with a similar history of English law systems. These legal complementarities between territories can emerge from historic colonial dependencies (de Goede, 2020), or may be engineered actively by states to provide local corporate interests with access to new markets (Rixen, 2013).…”