Chapter 5
Theory, Practice, and Crisis: Changing Economic Geographies of Money and Finance1
Introduction
Whilst financial markets boomed in the late 1990s and 2000s, research into the geographies of money and finance underwent its own period of expansion and transformation. Most notably, the subfield’s theoretical toolkit developed significantly, as earlier political-economy approaches were combined with a greater concern for the social, discursive, and cultural constitution of money and finance (Tickell 2003). By the 2000s, when I began my doctoral research, the resulting range of theoretical and substantive research interests had produced an increasingly outward looking and interdisciplinary research agenda in financial geography that drew on a range of literatures, including behavioral and institutional economics, new economic sociology, cultural economy, and financialization studies. However, as the international financial system virtually juddered to a halt in 2007 and 2008, important questions have emerged concerning the extent to which the financial geography in the 2000s, for all its polymorphous character, was seduced by the growing power of finance and lost sight of earlier research interests that stressed the risks, inequalities, and instabilities that characterize money and finance (cf. Harvey 1982; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Strange 1997).
In response, in this chapter, I use the financial crisis as a lens through which to examine the recent development of economic-geographical research into money and finance. In particular, I focus on the changing relationship between financial theory and practice, as articulated in leading international financial centers, notably London and New York, where most of my own research has been conducted. Here, examining what Ho (2009: 26) calls the “interstitial space between ‘virtual’ models and its ‘real’ effects” is valuable because the crisis has clearly demonstrated how financial practices depart from the assumptions built into the risk-management techniques developed by financial economists (Clark 2011). As such, the crisis raises important questions concerning the limited extent to which the socio-cultural approaches to money and finance developed by economic geographers in the 2000s were used to reveal the limitations of financial economics and its role in shaping the uneven causes and consequences of the crisis. However, my emphasis on the reproduction of financial theory in practice also points to the value of economic geographers’ well-established commitment to theoretically informed empirical research that foregrounds the actualities and complexity of everyday economic life. Drawing on this tradition, I argue that the vibrant financial geography of the 2000s, whilst not without its limitations, provides considerable possibilities for advancing politically engaged post-crisis economic geographies of money and finance that demonstrate the geographically heterogeneous ways in which financial theory is (re)produced in practice.
I make this argument by, firstly, examining the development of geographies of money and finance from the late 1990s onwards. At one level, the growth trajectory of the subfield at this time is indicative of economic geography more generally, as research moved beyond its earlier political-economic focus and became increasingly influenced by cultural studies and social theory (Leyshon 1995; 1997; 1998). However, rather than a distinctive cultural turn, financial geographers’ engagement with these wider social-science literatures is best characterized as a process of accretion, as new insights were combined with, rather than replacing wholesale, extant work. I then examine how this polymorphous economic geography of money and finance provided the building blocks for economic geographers to engage with other social scientists working on heterodox approaches to money and finance in the 2000s. Here I pay particular attention to economic geographers’ engagement with cultural economy approaches to financial markets that were developing rapidly at the time. In part, this focus reflects the ways in which I found this literature instructive in my own work at the time, which has examined how financial elites legitimated and developed the power of the international financial system through their use of financial economics and the “science” of risk management (Hall 2006).
However, this is also an opportunity to reflect on the limitations of this work and the ways in which a focus on micro-sociological financial practices reified the power of financial theory and markets in the 2000s, whilst neglecting earlier concerns surrounding the political economy of the international financial system (Engelen and Faulconbridge 2009). Building on this critique in the wake of the crisis, in the second part of the chapter, I use the literature on performativity, one of the central concepts of cultural economy, to examine how the relationship between financial theory and practice can be reconceptualized in more geographically and politically sensitive ways. Here I draw on the socioeconomic approaches to money and finance developed by economic geographers in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, I consider how such an approach can be used to decenter the power of financial economics, by demonstrating how it is legitimated and rendered powerful in particular times and places, rather than assuming an inevitability to its utilty in creating homogeneous, efficient financial markets that neatly correspond to abstract economic models. This represents a particularly timely research agenda, since the initial concerns expressed in political and media circles concerning the weaknesses and culpability of financial theory in the crisis have been dismissed remarkably quickly (French and Leyshon 2010). As such, whilst the financial system seeks to return to “business as usual,” maintaining a focus on the relationship between financial theory and practice in economic geography offers a valuable way of using the crisis to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of financial geography during its own post millennium boom and, more importantly, examining what the scope of the geographies of finance could or should be in the future.
Changing Geographies of Money and Finance
The geography of money and finance is a comparatively new subfield within economic geography, developing most rapidly from the early 1990s onwards (Leyshon 1995). During this early period of growth, a broadly political-economy approach was adopted in order to understand the (il)logics of the international financial system, building on Harvey’s (1982) seminal exposition of Marxist approaches to money and finance. For example, echoing economic geography’s wider interest in macro-scale socioeconomic transformations, notably the rise of post-Fordism, research examined the changing geopolitics of the international financial system following the collapse of Bretton Woods (Leyshon and Tickell 1994). This work focused on the role of place-based regulations and more informal norms, in order to understand how the international financial markets that emerged following the move to floating exchange rates after Bretton Woods were anchored in a small number of international and offshore centers (Martin 1999; Pryke 1991; Roberts 1995).
This research was vitally important in establishing a distinctly economic-geographical imagination in relation to money and finance. Most notably, geographers demonstrated the limitations of O’Brien’s (1991) “end of geography” thesis, in which it was argued that deepening financial integration, facilitated to a large extent by technological innovation, would weaken the importance of geographical co-location for financial services. Instead, geographers exposed the ways in which finance is practised differently in different places, producing an international financial system characterized by marked geographical variegation, one that is shaped by the interaction between place-specific regulation, processes of agglomeration and localization, and context-dependent social norms and cultural practices (see e.g. Thrift 1994). The vibrancy of research advancing these geographical imaginations at the time was reflected in the publication in a number of landmark monographs and edited collections that remain key texts within the geographies of money and finance (see Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Martin 1999; Thrift, Corbridge, and Martin 1994).
The role of social, cultural, and discursive practices in shaping financial geographies became a central research concern for economic geographers from the late 1990s onwards. However, rather than the cultural turn providing the impetus for a distinctive break with earlier political-economic research, several economic geographers who had been central to political-economy approaches to money and finance were also important in developing a social constructivist agenda, by exposing their earlier work to insights from cultural studies, social theory, and feminism (see e.g. Tickell 1996; 2003). Two particularly vibrant research strands emerged from this fusion of political economy and socioeconomic approaches to money and finance that are particularly relevant for my focus here on the relationship between financial theory and practice: first, work on the geographies of learning and knowledge circulation within international finance; and second, the embodied, performative nature of financial services work.
Socializing the Geographies of Money and Finance
Beginning with work on knowledge and learning practices, economic geographers have revealed the ways in which the knowledge- and information-rich nature of financial products plays a crucial role in shaping the international financial system. At one level, this research emphasizes the importance of local institutional, cultural, and social relations between financiers within financial districts in overcoming the significant knowledge asymmetries that typify client-provider relations in the provision of financial services (Clark and O’Connor 1997). This approach has subsequently been extended beyond a focus on established international financial centers, such as London and New York, to emerging and provincial centers (French 2002; Lai 2011). At another level, this work has drawn on insights from relational economic geography and new economic sociology to move beyond examining knowledge practices within financial centers to explore the importance of translocal knowledge circulation between financial centers (Clark and Wójcik 2001; Hall 2007a; Lai 2006). In so doing, this work contributes to wider debates concerning the geographies of knowledge circulation and learning by demonstrating the importance of understanding not only local “buzz” (Bathelt, Malmberg, and Maskell 2004) but also how these local practices sit alongside translocal processes of knowledge circulation and reproduction.
Second, economic geographers have examined how the expertise of financiers is not limited to their technical know-how but also encompasses a more embodied and emotive set of knowledges that are played out through bodily performances. For example, Thrift (1994) documents how elements of work and non-work sociality are vitally important in the (re)production of trust-based relationships between financiers that facilitate the production and circulation of knowledge. Meanwhile, Linda McDowell’s (1997) research on merchant banking in the City of London draws on the work of Judith Butler (1990) to reveal the gendered nature of such workplace performances. Rather than being epiphenomenal to the geographical concentration of financial services, geographers have also demonstrated how such performances have important implications for the regulation and governance of finance. For example, work on offshore financial centers documents how the geographical variation in socio-cultural practices and histories between centers gives rise to different perceptions of risk, trustworthiness, and hence different regulatory environments (Hudson 1998; see also Pryke 1991 for similar arguments relating to the City of London).
Taken together, these literatures foreground the micro-sociological practices of finance that were not given analytical primacy within earlier political-economy approaches. In so doing, this period of rapid growth within the field laid the groundwork for an increasingly interdisciplinary approach to the geographies of money and finance in the 2000s.
Outward-looking Geographies of Money and Finance
The international financial system underwent significant growth in the 2000s during what Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has termed the NICE decade (no inflation, constant expansion). As a researcher in the United Kingdom, I was deeply conscious of this, as the New Labour Government encouraged the growth of London’s financial district through competitive deregulation, thereby allowing the City to outcompete its long-standing rival, New York (Hall 2007b). More generally, this financial services boom saw firms and households increasingly tied into the international financial system (Langley 2008; Pike 2006) and the development of a range of new financial risk “management” tools, particularly those associated with derivatives and processes of securitization more generally (Tickell 2000).
This was an exciting time to be an economic geographer working on questions of money and finance. Building on the earlier development of socioeconomic approaches, researchers became increasingly outward looking in their theoretical choices, engaging with work from financialization to institutional approaches to finance (see Pike and Pollard 2010; Clark and Wójcik 2007, respectively). Whilst drawing on different theoretical traditions and substantive research concerns, these approaches were valuable to economic geographers because they facilitated greater understanding of the increasingly technical and quantitative nature of wholesale finance in the 2000s. This was achieved by engaging with what Clark and Wójcik (2007) term the theoretical language of finance, as reproduced through financial models and techniques, far more fully than earlier socioeconomic and political economy approaches had done.
Reflecting my concern with the reproduction of financial theory within investment banks in London’s financial district, I became increasingly interested in the interdisciplinary research project termed the social studies of finance that was also developing in the 2000s. Led by the sociologist of science, Donald MacKenzie, this literature draws on work by anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, as well as economic geographers, to focus on the ways in which financial markets are assembled through a combination of human and non-human actors such as computer screens and financial theories. It is this latter focus on the sociologies of financial economics that I have found particularly instructive when considering the relationship between financial theory and practice.
MacKenzie’s (2006) research on the performative qualities of financial economics demonstrates that, rather than simply describing the financial markets in which they circulate, financial theories shape the financial markets of which they are a part. In so doing, MacKenzie (2003) has drawn attention to the institutional and cultural contexts that are necessary for the development and application of financial theory, such as the need to draw a distinction between gambling and legitimate financial speculation in the case of the development of option pricing formulae. These insights into the wider socio-cultural contexts within which financial theory is reproduced are particularly valuable, since they open up space to develop genealogies of financial theories that do not take the power of financial economics as given or homogeneous. Rather, the cultural economy perspective advanced within the social studies of finance reveals how the reproduction of financial economics is always a negotiated process, involving institutions such as regulators, policymakers, and academics, as well as financial practitioners, as different actors seek to use financial economics to shape financial markets in particular ways in order to meet different aims (see e.g. McFall 2007 on the changing ways in which risk has, historically, been conceptualized within finance).
However, despite the potential for social studies of finance approaches to critique the power of financial economics, the dialog between economic geography and the social studies of finance has been limited, being best characterized as a one-way importing of work into economic geography (although see Hall 2006; Pryke 2007). In part, and in contrast to the more critical stance towards international finance that characterized early geographical research on money and finance, this patchy exchange reflects the ways in which an explicit critique of financial economics has not been developed within the social studies of finance to date. Rather, by focusing on the performativity of different “market devices” (Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007), particularly financial theory, work in the social studies of finance can be read as further empowering forms of rational calculation associated with neoclassical economics (Slater 2002). Indeed, examining the intersection between economic geographies of money and finance and work in the social studies of finance in the wake of the “global” financial crisis only serves to amplify these criticisms.
Perhaps most notably, social studies of finance approaches have their own genealogy, developing through research predominately in the heartlands of high finance (particularly the financial districts of London and New York) during a period of unprecedented financial services expansion in the 2000s. As such, it is relatively easy to see how it has been swept along with the seemingly limitless growth and power of financial economics in the 2000s, whilst largely neglecting the experiences of other places, throughout the boom and during the subsequent so-called “global” financial crisis (on which see Sidaway 2009; Wójcik 2009). This genealogy is particularly important for my interests in the relationship between financial theory and the practices within financial markets. Most notably, by focusing on the performativity of Chicago and Wall Street economics in their heartlands, relatively little attention has been given to how such theories become powerful in the first place and the implications of this beyond the neoliberal centers of finance.
Furthermore, by focusing on the technicalities of financial economics and its application in practice, the political implications of its power to legitimate certain kinds of financial markets, such as subprime lending or securitization have also been overlooked. Such limitations in the development of the social studies of finance to date are particularly problematic for work on the geographies of money and finance, with its theoretical lineage in political economy. In particular, adopting insights from the social studies of finance as they currently stand runs the risks of depoliticizing financial markets and hence concealing their uneven geographical effects, both of which have been long-standing research concerns for economic geographers (Engelen and Faulconbridge 2009; Pryke and du Gay 2007). In response, in the rest of this chapter, I consider the possibilities for expanding the geographical imaginations of work in the social studies of finance in order to develop a more politically attuned, yet culturally and socially sensitive geography of money and finance.
Post-crisis Performances of Money and Finance
Reflecting the ways in which economic geographies of money and finance have developed through the accretion of theoretical vocabularies and practices, rather than through a series of distinct turns, I explore how earlier socioeconomic work on money and finance in economic geography can be used to address the limitations of extant work on financial performativity. My focus on performativity reflects the ways in which financial theory and financial economics were instrumental in the development of the financial products that would lie at the heart of the financial crisis, notably asset-backed securities and collatorized debt obligations. However, rather than relying exclusively on a social studies of finance approach to excavate how these theories and techniques were actualized in a descriptive manner, I examine how this literature might be developed in order to decenter the power of mainstream financial theory. In particular, I explore how work in economic geography and the social studies of finance might be brought into a productive dialog in order to consider, firstly, how the power of financial theory is reproduced, and secondly, how such power might be contested. In order to do this, I draw on Barnes’ (2008) discussion of the ways in which the spatial sensitivity of work in economic geography can be used to advance work on performativity more generally.
Performativity and Power: Genealogies of Financial Theory
Barnes’ (2008) call for research to examine the genealogy of economic theory and its subsequent circulation in geographically specific performances has already been developed in economic geography through work on the Chicago school of economics and models of free trade (see Peck 2008; Sheppard 2005, respectively). Moreover, in the case of finance, research has examined the role of business schools, particularly Chicago, in legitimating financial economics as a subfield of economic theory in the 1960s (Bernstein 1992; Whitley 1986). However, the financial crisis demands that this research be expanded beyond a focus on the institutionalization of academic financial economics to consider the ways in which financial economic theories are accorded power through their use as legitimation devices for particular financial practices and products, since it was these activities that were central to the crisis.
This raises the question of the institutions and organizations involved in legitimating and circulating economic and financial theory into business practices. Thrift (2005) identifies business schools, management consultants, and business gurus as being important actors in this respect, invoking what he terms the “cultural circuit of capital.” Inspired by this work, I have conducted research that examines the role of business schools and other forms of business education in reproducing financial elites who are fluent in the financial theories and routine practices of financial markets (Hall 2008; Hall and Appleyard 2009). This research has revealed how financial theories are not “immutable mobiles” (Latour 1987) that circulate in an inert fashion into the offices of investment banks. Rather, whilst the basic principles underlying different financial products remain relatively constant, they are developed and applied in geographically and organizationally heterogeneous ways, as financiers seek to respond to the often differing demands of regulators, their employing firms, and their own career aspirations.
This reveals the limitations of assumptions made about the behavior of individual financial elites within the financial theories and risk-management systems at the heart of the crisis. These emphasized the ability of financial innovations, such as securitization, to reproduce highly liquid, homogenous markets capable of distributing and managing financial risks (see e.g. Bernanke 2007). Moreover, the gulf between the assumptions made within financial economics in policymaking and regulatory circles and actual financial practice also points to the role of powerful actors in discursively legitimating financial theories. For example, this resonates with a wider cultural-economy literature that examines not only how economic theories are used to perform economic realities, but also how powerful actors aim to engineer economic life to conform to economic theory (Miller 1998). In the case of the crisis, the power of financial elites in seeking to reproduce markets that meet their theoretical assumptions (and hence negate their agency in causing the crisis) is starkly exposed in US subprime housing markets that are crucially important spaces in both the causes and uneven consequences of the crisis. Here, financiers have sought to frame subprime mortgage lending as the logical expansion of mortgage lending, based on “scientific” risk profiling, whilst downplaying the role of predatory lending structured along class and racial lines (Wyly et al. 2009).
Building on this examination of the spaces and actors involved in shaping the performativity of economic theory, Barnes (2008: 1442) calls for research that examines “how geography enters into the performance of markets.” In this respect, work in the social studies of finance has identified the importance of space and place in the reproduction of markets (see Zaloom 2006). However, the precise nature of these geographical contexts, or what MacKenzie (2003) terms “worlds,” remains comparatively undertheorized. In particular, the ways in which place-specific attributes interact with the performance of financial theory, giving rise to processes of both convergence and divergence within the international financial system, remains significantly undertheorized. Indeed, there remains considerable debate as to the relative importance of different place-specific attributes, ranging from labor market policies to financial regulation, in reproducing financial markets, in both academic and policy circles (see e.g. Z/Yen 2010 in the case of financial centers). In contrast, much of the socioeconomic and political-economy research in economic geography addresses precisely this issue and hence offers considerable scope to develop understandings of the ways in which geography is not simply an inert backdrop upon which financial markets are performed but is itself a crucial actor in shaping such performances.
In particular, economic geographers have drawn on institutional economics in seeking to understand how the nature of specific places (most notably different international financial centers) shapes the reproduction of financial markets (Clark 2005; Clark and Wójcik 2007; Martin 1999). This work specifies a number of factors that combine to create distinctive financial spaces including: formal rules and regulatory frameworks; dense relationships between firms that facilitate knowledge circulation and exchange between financial actors; informal rules and norms concerning the accepted ways of conducting financial business; and broader organizational structures such as trade organizations and lobbying groups that influence the growth of financial services. In addition to using this approach to demonstrate the continued differences between “global” financial centers, economic geographers have also revealed how similar financial and economic dispositions-cum-theories, such as a commitment to deregulated markets, are performed differently beyond the heartlands of high finance, for instance in emerging financial centers (see e.g. Lai 2011). This work underlines the continued heterogeneity found in the performativity of international financial markets and financial systems. It also reveals the variegated nature of finance as some underlying processes such as regulation and accounting procedures become increasingly harmonized globally, and yet these are not leading to a globally homogeneous international financial system because geographical differences continue to shape the implementation of these processes in different places (see e.g. Clark and Wójcik 2005; Engelen this volume). This research clearly raises important questions concerning the ability of transnational regulatory changes such as Basel II to “manage” the international financial system in the wake of the crisis, given its extremely limited consideration of how transnational agreements intersect with regulations across geographical sites and scales.
Performativity and Contestation: The “Spatial Politics” of Finance
The legitimation of certain forms of financial theory by powerful actors also opens up space to explore how an economic-geographical imagination can be used to develop what Barnes (2008: 1444) terms the “spatial politics of market organization.” He suggests that such a focus allows cultural economy research more generally to respond to criticisms that it reinforces the power of neoclassical economics by revealing the experimental qualities of market performances. Two extant literatures in economic geography on money and finance provide rich resources to develop this approach in the wake of the financial crisis. First, there is a now well-established literature that has examined the creation and reproduction of alternative, geographically specific currency systems (Leyshon, Lee, and Williams 2003). In addition to advancing theoretical understandings of what money is and what it can do, this work also contributes to wider debates concerning the identification and reproduction of non-mainstream, or what Gibson-Graham (2006) term diverse economies (see also Gibson-Graham this volume). Similarly, Smith (2009) has adopted a cultural-economy perspective to consider how new markets for the trade of housing derivatives offer the opportunity to perform housing markets differently, for instance by protecting the investment risk homeowners hold in the form of equity in their property.
However, it is not only in terms of retail finance that economic geographers can develop understandings of the performativity of alternative financial worlds. Research on wholesale finance has revealed the ways in which financial theories beyond those associated with orthodox financial economics can be performed in particular places. For example, Pollard and Samers (2007) have explored the circulation of the economic theories that underpin Islamic banking and finance, demonstrating how these intersect with “western” financial networks. Adopting a postcolonial perspective, they argue that economic geography needs to acknowledge the situated nature of knowledge as it is produced through a small number of research sites in the global North, a criticism that can equally be leveled at research in the social studies of finance. Indeed, prior to the crisis, research in both economic geography and the social studies of finance on wholesale finance was overwhelmingly located in the heartlands of financial economics in London and New York. As such, relatively little is known about how these theories were circulated and contested in other types of financial centers and the mechanisms through which they obtained their power in these places. Developing such insights is vitally important if economic geographers are to be successful in decentring the power of financial economics by revealing its heterogeneity and contested reproduction.
Second, and building on the need to examine the performance of financial theory beyond leading international financial centers, there is considerable scope to develop a fuller dialog between economic geographers sympathetic to the social studies of finance approach and those that have engaged with work on financialization (on which see Engelen this volume). This latter literature focuses on the growing power of money and finance in everyday life, as both firms and households became increasingly tied into the international financial system throughout the 2000s (Langley 2008). Whilst the financialization literature is polymorphous, with theoretical approaches ranging from neoFoucauldian work on financial subjectivites to studies of financialization and corporate strategy from a critical accounting perspective, it shares a far stronger common commitment to meso-scale political economy as compared to the social studies of finance. As a result, it is much more sensitive to the crisis-prone nature of finance capitalism and the consequences of crisis for firms and households within financialized growth models (see e.g. Montgomerie and Williams, 2009; Engelen et al. 2010 in relation to the financial crisis of 2008).
However, by focusing on the consequences of financialized growth models at the meso scale, it has paid less attention to the role of financial theory in shaping the performance of such models at a micro scale – questions that have been central research concerns within the social studies of finance. In response, geographers have begun to examine how the intersection between these literatures might be explored in more detail. For example, Wainwright (2009) documents the ways in which the theories of securitization that lay behind the boom in mortgage lending in many advanced economies in the 2000s involved geographically specific uses of financial theory that were developed and used differently in the United States and United Kingdom. This work forms part of an emerging literature in which economic geographers have begun to demonstrate the geographically uneven causes, consequences, and implications of what is erroneously termed the “global” financial crisis (Aalbers 2009; Martin 2011). Such an approach is clearly important in demonstrating the limited geographical imaginations embedded within financial theory. However, by developing a meso-scale of analysis that combines the micro scale concerns of the social studies of finance with the political economy approach of the financialization literature, it also offers economic geographers working on money and finance the opportunity of using the crisis to reflect on both the strengths and weaknesses of the subfield in the 2000s. This would enable economic geographers to contribute to regulatory and political debates concerning the future development of the international financial system and its uneven socioeconomic impacts, calling attention to the ways in which explorations of micro-scale practices can be used to understand the broader structures and ecologies of crisis prone finance.
Conclusion
The geographies of money and finance have developed markedly since the formation of the subfield in the early 1990s. By the time I entered the discipline in the early 2000s, research had built on earlier political-economy approaches to develop socioeconomic understandings of the geographies of the international financial system. Since this time, researchers have continued to engage with a range of interdisciplinary approaches to money and finance. However, the financial crisis of the late 2000s and ensuing global recession raise a series of questions concerning the political and critical capability of this literature and the extent to which economic geographers, alongside politicians, firms, and households, became increasingly seduced by finance, losing sight of earlier concerns surrounding the uneven development and consequences of the international financial system.
In this chapter, I have used the crisis as a conjunctural moment through which to reflect critically on the development of economic geographies of money and finance. Reflecting my own research interests, and the nature of the crisis itself, I have paid particular attention to the relationship between financial theory and practice. This intersection provides significant opportunities for economic geographers to develop more politically and geographically sensitive understandings of the international financial system, by revealing how the power of financial economics that was central to the financial innovations of the 2000s, and which underpinned the crisis itself, was essentialized by financial practitioners, policymakers, and regulators. Two implications for the future of economic geography research into money and finance emerge from this discussion. First, in order to decenter the power of financial economics, it is vital that economic geographers expand their range of research sites in order to understand in more detail how financial theories are implemented differently in different places. Indeed, the concentration of research in the heartlands of financial economics in the 2000s by geographers and other social scientists contributed to the myopia of the times, while neglecting the instabilities and contradictions of the international financial system. Second, by examining the genealogy of financial theory, geographers are well placed to reveal the power relations involved in its performance. This is important since it reveals how financial economics is a contested intellectual and practical project that relies on enrolling a number of intermediaries in order to legitimate and reproduce itself. In turn, this approach opens up space to examine how alternative, more progressive forms of financial markets might be performed using different types of financial theories. Such an approach is not without its own risks and uncertainties, not least in terms of how to sustain a meaningful interdisciplinary trade in ideas through a range of academic practices such as publishing and conference attendance in an increasingly neoliberal academy. However, I do not believe these obstacles should prevent such an agenda being developed, since the need to consider how financial markets might be performed differently in the wake of the crisis presents opportunities for economic geographers to play important roles in the work of shaping a more reproducible and sustainable international financial system in the future.
Note
1 This chapter was developed with the support of an ESRC First Grant (RES-061-25-0071). I am also grateful to Jamie Peck for his very helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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