Managing financial globalisation properly: Defending the open-market order at the Bank for International Settlements

Description

Over this period, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has developed and promoted a novel conception of global finance as a hyper-complex ‘matrix of interlocking balance sheets’, in which global financial cycles threaten economic and social stability. As a remedy for the undesirable ‘side effects’ of globalisation, the BIS has advocated a cooperative, far-sighted, prudent, data-intensive, and thoroughly depoliticised form of global financial governance, which it sees as capable of providing enduring macrofinancial stability for the open-market order. Recently, this has been extended to incorporate the growing threat of climate change and the challenges posed by new financial technologies. Extending the analysis theoretically, Jack examines the technocratic worldview that underpins the BIS’s defence of financial globalisation. This worldview is guided by a (utopian) desire to definitively solve the problems of economic management and mobilizes a set of perpetually receding horizons whereby ‘good’ financial governance becomes a process with no clear endpoint and few markers of success, one of perpetual pursuit of a lasting stability which capitalism is unable to deliver, yet which must discipline the conduct of policymakers.