ABSTRACT
This chapter expands on Hoyle's assessment by noting the ways in which the legal and regulatory debates around fringe lending place particular emphasis on issues of formal legitimacy. This chapter is divided into three sections. The first section occupies a key spot in the social studies of finance, and suggests that regulation can often be performative; practices that bring into being the objects they seek merely to manage. A second section builds on this conceptual frame by developing an argument that examines an international wave of regulatory practices over the past decade, much of which orbits around the possibilities that payday and micro-lending might be formalized as a legally settled and permissible object. A third section notes, however, that formalization is an essentially uneven project. At one level, formalization occupies the very centre of a diagram concerned with the extraction of value from the very edges of the financial system.
