ABSTRACT
As an interdisciplinary field of study, International Political Economy (IPE) has established itself as one of the key academic avenues for inquiry into global finance. IPE scholars have done much to begin to develop an alternative understanding of global finance to that offered by the dominant neo-liberal mode of knowledge. Yet it is the contention here that, like the neo-liberal common sense present in mainstream economics, technocratic circles and the business press, the field of IPE has tended to overlook the ties that bind global finance and our everyday pension, investment, insurance, mortgage and consumer credit practices.1 Global finance is, then, typically represented as existing ‘out there’ and somehow separate from our everyday lives. By contrast, this chapter reflects upon the significance of our everyday saving and borrowing practices in global finance. It is argued that revaluing the everyday has considerable implications for how global financial governance is understood. As such, the chapter contributes to the objective of this volume to consider global financial governance in a holistic manner as constituted by numerous and inter-related sets of authority relations across various ‘levels’, spaces and social settings.
