International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   This essay focuses on the insights that have been provided by the evolving and now voluminous literature on the global organization of finance. With regard to organization , a contribution of this literature has been to show that popular images that obscure the organized character of global finance, such as those that picture it as ephemeral flows of electronic signals or atomized arm's length market transactions responding to an invisible hand, are misleading. As this essay will show, there are numerous ways in which the global organization of finance has been analyzed, including understanding the role played by states, by transnational public sector regulatory bodies, by the structural properties of capitalism, by ideas and ideologies, or by the discursive properties of risk models or business practices, among others. A number of topics that in other contexts might be included in discussions of global finance are not the focus of this essay because they appear elsewhere in this compendium, including money, sovereign debt, financial crises, foreign direct investment, the political economy of development, and formal international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. There is also a large literature on technical or more purely economic aspects of global financial markets, such as how to price derivatives, that ... log in or subscribe to read full text