ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the evolving role and function of central banks in the post-crisis geography of money. In many ways, national central banks provide the most powerful national lever for leaning against the winds of economic globalization. The chapter takes at the different dimensions of monetary space and the role central banks are playing in the governance of each of these realms. While the authors have focused on this nexus in the context of ‘currency space’, it is clear that the structure and function of ‘policy and regulatory space’ are closely linked to the institutional evolution of its monetary hierarchy. In short, monetary space thus conceptualized is not the locus for financial localization effects between economic actors per se, but the money-based force fields and power-relations between economic actors. In the setting of this new geography, states were developing new modes of monetary governance that increasingly mirrored the process of ‘marketization’ that was taking hold in other realms of economic governance.
