ABSTRACT
Over the past 40 years, a complex series of interlinked policy decisions and economic circumstances has led us to the point where the health (or problems) of the global economy rely more and more upon the stability (or instability) of the financial sector. Furthermore, as was so evident in the 1998 fears for the global economy at the time of the Asian crisis (Wade 1998, 2000; Wade and Veneroso 1998; Fitzgerald 1999; Eichengreen 1999; Noble and Ravenhill 2000), or the collapse of key institutions such as Long Term Capital Management or Barings Bank (Tickell 1996, 1999, 2001; Mackenzie 2000; Edwards 1999; de Goede 2001), an (infectious) crisis in one part of the international financial system is highly contagious. As financial markets and financial institutions have become more interlinked, and more international in reach, so too have their influences on national economies. The financial sector has become intellectually influential too, in large part because the conservative ideological persuasion of its practitioners blends so comfortably with capitalism’s ideologies of market power and dominance (Cox 1999). For example, advocates of (the neoliberal variant of) globalization have argued that the liquidity and efficiency gains from unrestricted financial markets pave the way to a liberal globalized future of unlimited promise (Bryan and Farrell 1996).
