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Capital at Its Fringes

Marieke de Goede has recently emphasised the need for critical genealogies of global finance which can make visible the ways in which ‘finance’ and ‘capital’ became constituted as discrete categories – categories that are often depicted and governed as highly rational, technical and instrumental sets of practices. The constitution of finance over the past centuries as a formalised and morally acceptable domain required practices and forms of knowledge designed to separate it from a range of dubious categories with which it was entangled. This ordering of finance as a technical and rational universe also entailed the development of contemporary accounting techniques and a body of legal jurisprudence designed to construct a separation, in both discourse and practice, between finance and other practices from which it sought to distance itself, namely, gambling and predatory commercial activity. As de Goede notes, ‘understanding finance as a performative practice focuses debate on the exclusions made for finance discourse to emerge as a rational, normal, scientific, and respectable practice’. The attempt to separate finance from a range of other practices continues to occupy a key location in the global political-economic landscapes of our present time. Much of the policy response to the instabilities in global financial markets of the late 1990s, for example, sketched out a ‘new financial architecture’, part of which orbited around calls for ‘transparency’ and new macro-prudential indicators designed to re-inscribe a boundary between finance and other forms of economic activity labelled as corrupt or ‘incestuous’. The processes through which finance is marked off from other domains, however, are incomplete and uneven. As global financial markets increasingly exert a staggering pressure across the global political economy, the border between ‘finance’ and its more shadowy ‘others’ is blurred. Liberalised international financial markets have often been implicated in money laundering, illicit drug finance, arms trade financing and the movement of ‘hot money’. In addition, the recent high profile accounting scandals – the Enron, WorldCom and Nortel debâcles – have directed renewed attention to the illegalities that often accompany modes of financial reporting which are central to the AngloAmerican model of capitalism. Perhaps the fastest growing of finance’s ‘others’, and a case that forms the core of this article, is the world of ‘alternative financial services’ – a world I refer to as New Political Economy, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2006