Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures

Bernards, Nick; Campbell‐Verduyn, Malcolm

doi:10.1080/09692290.2019.1625420

Cited by 112 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Cryptocurrencies should be approached and conceptualized beyond any 'blockchain exceptionalism.' Third, a concern with the political economy entailed by design, deployment and funding of money and payment infrastructure is needed precisely at a point in time when these infrastructures are becoming ubiquitous (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019). If infrastructures become so when they recede from view, a focus on the power, control, and distributive effects of infrastructures are necessary to prevent these forms of power and exclusion from becoming a repressed 'technological unconscious' (Thrift 2004) of money.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple

Rella

2020

Journal of Cultural Economy

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Money's materiality produces an ontological conundrum for social theory: should the analysis of money foreground the objects used as money, or the abstract relations that underpin it? Provoked by the emergence of cryptocurrencies, this paper develops a conceptualization of money as a technological and social infrastructure which directly addresses this theoretical impasse. Cryptocurrencies' sole form of material existence coincides with their underpinning infrastructure of records, accounting and payments. In the past decade, cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed in number, and they have been applied to a host of use cases. This paper focuses on cross-border payments through the example of the fintech company Ripple, the cryptocurrency XRP, and the design of the XRP Ledger. Combining literatures from the social theory of money, science and technology studies and new materialisms, this article develops steps towards an ecological conceptualization of money infrastructures. Infrastructures, understood ecologically, include devices, active forms, and imaginaries in seamless webs of mutual relations of co-evolution. These ecologies are always potentially prone to slippage, dissolution, disassembling, reassembling and reappropriation, dependence, and competition.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple

Rella

2020

Journal of Cultural Economy

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“…Mann's (1984) work on the infrastructural power of the state, Braun (2018) for instance demonstrates how states' attempts to govern through markets provide financial actors with infrastructural power due to states' increasing entanglement with financial markets for which they rely for governance purposes (also, Braun and Gabor 2020). Infrastructure is hereby conceptualised relationally (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019), and it is this entanglement that provides financial actors with infrastructural power (Gabor 2016, Sgambati 2019, as state-market interactions take place 'on the turf and according to the rules of financial markets' (Braun and Gabor 2020, p. 241). Crucially, as Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn (2019, p. 783) emphasise, 'power often depend[s] on control over key financial infrastructures'.…”

Section: Exchanges Transformed: the New Business Model Of Global Exchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Scholars have analysed the role of credit rating agencies and technology companies as market authorities (Sinclair 2005, Campbell-Verduyn 2016, the continuous power of banks (Ertürk and Solari 2007), how hedge funds exercise power through derivatives or short-selling (Ertürk et al 2010), or the growing power of asset managers in a shift towards passive investment (Fichtner et al 2017). Recently, debates in IPE have focused on the infrastructural power of finance, as states become more and more entangled with financial markets (Braun 2018, Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019, Genito 2019a, Gabor 2020. It is this relational entanglement with financial infrastructures that increases states' dependence on market-based finance (Braun and Gabor 2020) and provides power to financial institutions through e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From National Marketplaces to Global Providers of Financial Infrastructures: Exchanges, Infrastructures and Structural Power in Global Finance

Petry

2020

New Political Economy

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This paper analyses the role of (stock and derivative) exchanges as powerful actors in global finance. While most IPE accounts of exchanges analyse 'exchanges as marketplaces' and focus on equity market trading, they miss how exchanges have fundamentally transformed in the last 25 years. Through marketisation, internationalisation and digitisation, the business model of exchanges has fundamentally changed and led to the emergence of global exchange groups that dominate the exchange industry (CME, ICE, LSE, Cboe, Nasdaq and Deutsche Börse). Thereby, exchanges transformed from national marketplaces to global providers of financial infrastructures. They control the infrastructures that enable the functioning of capital markets: from market data, indices, financial products, trading platforms to post-trading activities such as clearing, exchanges create the rules according to which market transactions take place. This provision of financial infrastructures enables them to shape capital markets and represents a source of structural power, as exchanges potentially influence the actions of companies, investors and states entangled with these infrastructures. By shedding light on exchanges and their changed role and activities within capital markets, this paper makes a case for including exchanges as powerful actors into IPE analyses of global finance and for more closely analysing the structural power of (financial) infrastructure providers in the global economy. KEYWORDS Structural power; financial infrastructures; global finance; stock exchange; capital markets We are of course known as a US exchange but that's a very small part of our business, only about 10% of our revenue. […] The major part of our business is what we today call FinTech. […] So, we provide infrastructure to the world's capital markets. We have more than 100 marketplaces around the world that are using our technology for their day-today trading, clearing, settlement, risk management. […] We sell market data in different shapes and forms from markets in Europe and the US, we do index business, licensing our indices to asset managers that provide ETF products, […] we participate in the big derivative markets … […] Today, we are truly a global and technology-focused company. (Senior manager, global exchange (Hong Kong, 5 July 2017)).

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“…Ironically, it is the growing complexity of economic exchange and transactions that create vulnerabilities which then need to be secured. In the case of finance, which Marieke de Goede examines in her contribution to this special issue, these vulnerabilities relate to financial infrastructures, which if disrupted could quickly ripple through economic relations more widely (Bernards & Campbell-Verduyn, 2019). In the age of increasingly digitalized finance, this Achilles heel has become easier to attack: the complexity of finance means that there are more potential points of disruption.…”

Section: The Security-economy Nexusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Blind spots in IPE: marginalized perspectives and neglected trends in contemporary capitalism

LeBaron

Mügge

Best

et al. 2020

Review of International Political Economy

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Which blind spots shape scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE)? That question animates the contributions to a double special issue-one in the Review of International Political Economy, and a companion one in New Political Economy. The global financial crisis had seemed to vindicate broad-ranging IPE perspectives at the expense of narrow economics theories. Yet the tumultuous decade since then has confronted IPE scholars with rapidly-shifting global dynamics, many of which had remained underappreciated. We use the Blind Spots moniker in an attempt to push the topics covered here higher up the scholarly agenda-issues that range from institutionalized racism and misogyny to the rise of big tech, intensifying corporate power, expertise-dynamics in global governance, assetization, and climate change. Gendered and racial inequalities as blind spots have a particular charge. There has been a self-reinforcing correspondence between topics that have counted as important, people to whom they matter personally, and the latter's ability to build careers on them. In that sense, our mission is not only to highlight collective blind spots that may dull IPE's capacity to theorize the current moment. It is also a normative one-a form of disciplinary housekeeping to help correct both intellectual and professional entrenched biases.

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Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures

Cited by 112 publications

References 79 publications

Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple

Steps towards an ecology of money infrastructures: materiality and cultures of Ripple

From National Marketplaces to Global Providers of Financial Infrastructures: Exchanges, Infrastructures and Structural Power in Global Finance

Blind spots in IPE: marginalized perspectives and neglected trends in contemporary capitalism

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