How central bankers learned to love financialization
The Fed, the Bank, and the enlisting of unfettered markets in the conduct of monetary policy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4237293 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Timo Walter (0000-0003-3727-3080, University of Erfurt), Leon Wansleben (0000-0003-0807-420X, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 625-653 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Socio-Economic Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1475-1461 • E-ISSN: 1475-147X |
| DOI | 10.1093/ser/mwz011 |
| OpenAlex | W2951018547 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 45 |
| References cited | 80 |
Central banks' role in financialization has received increasing attention in recent years. These debates have predominantly revolved around authorities' 'benign neglect' of asset bubbles, their deregulatory policies, and the safety nets they provide for speculative exuberance. Most analyses refer to the dominance of pro-market interests and ideas to explain these actions. The present article moves beyond these accounts by showing how an alignment between techniques of monetary governance and 'unfettered' financial markets can explain central banks' endorsement of increasingly fragile structures of liquidity and their strategic ignorance towards growing amounts of debt. We analyze the processes of abstraction and formalization by which the 'programmes' and 'technologies' of monetary governance have been made compatible with the texture of contemporary finance; and we show how central banks' attempts to make markets more amenable to their methods of policy implementation shaped new conduits for financial growth. As empirical cases, we discuss the Federal Reserve's experiments with different policy frameworks in the 1980s and the Bank of England's twisted path to inflation targeting from 1979 to 1997. These cases allow us to demonstrate that the infrastructural power of contemporary central banking is predicated on the same institutional foundations that have made financialization possible
Corporate governance · Dominance (genetics · Economics · Financial market · Financial system · Financialization · Ignorance · Market economy · Market liquidity · Monetary economics · Monetary policy · Political science · Economic Theory and Policy · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Finance · Law
Relational state-market hybridity
The Politics of Uncertainty
Inside the black box
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Financial innovation for climate justice
Financialization and Fictitious Capital
Formal institution building in financialized capitalism
Risk Entanglement in the Finance-State Nexus
Financialisation, regional economic development and the coronavirus crisis
One future to bind them all? Modern central banking and the limits of performative governability
The Power of Finance in the Age of Market Based Banking
Governing Global Liquidity
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Unconventional central banking and the politics of liquidity
Minsky’s moment? The rise of depoliticised Keynesianism and ideational change at the Federal Reserve after the financial crisis of 2007/08
Co-working in the collateral factory
Financial globalization as positive integration
One state, one interest? How a historic shock to the balance of power of the Bundesbank and the German government laid the path for fiscal austerity
Varieties of ignorance in neoliberal policy
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Managing Climate Change Like a Central Banker
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The quiet side of debt
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Uncomfortable knowledge in central banking
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Shadow money and the public money supply
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Banking on Bonds
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Seeing Like the Fed
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| Unique citing works | 45 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 7,5 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 44 |