Banking Across Boundaries Placing Finance in Capitalism

by Christophers, Brett

• ISBN13: 9781444338287
• ISBN10: 1444338285
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-04-01
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

The author's unique perspective on the geographical and conceptual 'placement' of the banking industry is a compelling contribution to the contemporary debate about the industry. It traces the evolving links between the two, revealing how our notions of banking 'productiveness' have evolved alongside the shifting loci of banking activity. Unique combination of theoretical approaches from political economy and the contemporary literature on the performativity of economics An original voice in the urgent debate on capital and banking reignited by the current economic crisis Analyzes the social conceptualization of the nature - and value - of the banking industry Illuminates the contingency of economic ideas, shaped by mutable economic realities at the same time as giving form to our evolving conception of the economic environment

Author Biography

Brett Christophers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford, UK, British Columbia, Canada, and Auckland, New Zealand, and is the author of Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (1998) and Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (2009).

Table of Contents

List of Figures viii

List of Abbreviations ix

Acknowledgments x

Introduction 1

Part I Worlds Apart: Before Keynes 25

1 The Birth of Economic Productiveness 27

2 Instrumental Internationalism 57

Part II Worlds Aligned: From the Great Depression to the Eve of the Big Bang 101

3 Enclosing the Unproductive 103

4 America, and Boundaries Breached 146

Part III Co-Constituted Worlds: The Age of Financialization? 185

5 Layering the Logics of Free Trade in Banking 187

6 Anaemic Geographies of Productive Finance 229

Afterword 275

Index 282