ABSTRACT
A century ago, the Canadian political economist and humorist Stephen Leacock (1910) wrote a famous essay describing how banks rattled him. If he were alive today, he would no doubt be even more rattled by over-the-counter (Otc) derivatives. So too, it seems, are scholars of global governance. A search of considerable literature on the politics of international financial regulation turns up only a few sources examining these complex financial products. A more charitable interpretation might be that scholars have neglected the subject because they thought there was so little to study; OTC derivatives, after all, have been one of the most unregulated realms of global finance. However, those brave few scholars who have explored the subject have shown how the absence of regulation is just as interesting to try to explain as its presence (e.g. Coleman 2003; Tsingou 2006). As Susan Strange (1986) reminded us years ago, non-decisions are in fact often more much worthy of study than decisions.
