Narrating imagined crises
How central bank storytelling exerts infrastructural power
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7447307 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nathan Coombs (0000-0002-7319-1181, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 679-702 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Economy and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0308-5147 • E-ISSN: 1469-5766 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03085147.2022.2117313 |
| OpenAlex | W4307387808 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
| References cited | 59 |
While a rich literature has examined how central banks mobilize narratives to enrol publics in monetary policymaking, the effects of the narratives deployed in banking supervision remain neglected. Drawing on 21 expert interviews, this paper fills that lacuna through a study of stress testing, a technique that became a fixture of international banking supervision after the 2008 crisis and which the Bank of England is using to align the risk management of the United Kingdom's banks with its sense-making about emerging financial stability risks. I theorize the entanglements of the Bank's financial stability narratives with binding supervisory requirements as giving rise to a new form of 'infrastructural power'. This perspective explains why some financial sector actors see their decision-making autonomy being sapped away by the Bank's stress tests even though they work through banks' own risk sensitive calculative infrastructures. The paper's findings also point to how the infrastructural affordances of central banks' forward-looking narratives are pushing the temporal frontier of the state-economy boundary further into the future than has traditionally been considered an appropriate operational domain
Autonomy · Business · Economic system · Economics · Economy · Financial crisis · Financial system · Macroeconomics · Market economy · Narrative · Political economy · Political science · Power (physics · Sociology · Global Financial Regulation and Crises · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Law
Relational state-market hybridity
Remembering crises
Too political to delegate? Financial stability and the politics of depoliticization
A Climate for Investors. Climate Scenarios in the Network for Greening the Financial System
Resilience and transnational financial regulation
One future to bind them all? Modern central banking and the limits of performative governability
The digital euro
Entangled Narratives
Traditional banks go digital
The Bank of England and conservative sound money politics
The Infrastructural Power of the Cayman Islands and the US State Power
Enacting efficient markets
The economic exception
Independence without purpose? Macroprudential regulation at the Bundesbank
Post-growth tokens or token post-growth? Bitcoin, alt-coins and infrastructural evolution in digital finance
Recentering central banks
Growth at risk
Uncomfortable knowledge in central banking
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision
The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve
Mann's theory of ideological power
The Sources of Social Power
The Bankers’ New Clothes
Uncertain Futures
The Status Quo Crisis
Narrative Construction as Sensemaking
Scientization of Central Banking
An Engine, Not a Camera
The Narrative Paradigm
Capital and Time
The Sources of Social Power
The New Political Economy of the Macroprudential Ideational Shift
Measuring and mitigating systemic risks
American hegemony
Predicting the unpredictable
Render Unto Caesar
Infrastructural Power Revisited
Is resilience enough? The macroprudential reform agenda and the lack of smoothing of the cycle
Imagined Futures
Banking supervision and the politics of verification
Making monetary markets transparent
Governing the future
Social Knowledge in the Making
Governing the system
Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures
Speaking to the people? Money, trust, and central bank legitimacy in the age of quantitative easing
What do stress tests test? Experimentation, demonstration, and the sociotechnical performance of regulatory science
Seeing Like the Fed
Constructing conviction through action and narrative
Credit policy and the 'debt shift' in advanced economies
How central bankers learned to love financialization
Central banking and the infrastructural power of finance
The Pragmatic Sources of Modern Power
The autonomous power of the state
The Limits of the State
Economy of Words
The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
Recentering central banks
Growth at risk
Independence without purpose? Macroprudential regulation at the Bundesbank
Exchanging expectations
What is an algorithm? Financial regulation in the era of high-frequency trading
Anticipating uncertainty, reviving risk? On the stress testing of finance in crisis
Mann, war, and cyberspace
Imagined futures
| Unique citing works | 18 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 4,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 17 |