ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section describes some of the diverse efforts to craft what Zelizer has referred to as alternative economic circuits. These alternative circuits are often built around a kind of social relationality that is counterposed to the instrumental rationality that governs mainstream financial networks. A second section addresses one of these alternative circuits of incorporation that has grown rapidly over the past decade p2p financial networks. A third section examines the ways in which these networks have also become the object of attention by mainstream financial agents: in the bundling and securitization of loans, in the involvement of large capital market investors and hedge funds in the p2p sector, and even in the role of banks in circulating their own capital through p2p lending networks. A fourth section returns to broader issues by noting the ways in which p2p networks emblematize fringe finance as practices which embody a certain innovation and fragility.
