Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism

Beginning with the assertion that critiques of the banking industry′s economic productiveness are manifestations of a problematic duality that imposes socially constructed oppositions between productive and non–productive and ′real′ and financial economies, this unique synthesis of theoretical approaches relates two historical narratives. It details the processes by which Western banking has internationalized, and analyzes how representations of the banking sector′s ′productiveness′, or otherwise, have taken different forms throughout the evolution of Western economic theory, mutating in tandem with the latter′s development. Examining the relationship between these two narratives, the author sheds light on how we, as a society, ′place′ banks conceptually; on how banks, as economic institutions, have ′placed′ themselves geographically; and on how these two modes of ′placement′ have become increasingly intertwined. In the process, the book illuminates not only how economic ideas ′perform′ and shape the economic world, but how those ideas are themselves always products of particular economic realities. This original contribution to the perennial debate over the financial services industry will be read with added urgency by scholars spurred on in their analyses by the contemporary financial crisis.

List of Figures viii List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 Part I Worlds Apart: Before Keynes 25 1 The Birth of Economic Productiveness 27 2 Instrumental Internationalism 57 Part II Worlds Aligned: From the Great Depression to the Eve of the Big Bang 101 3 Enclosing the Unproductive 103 4 America, and Boundaries Breached 146 Part III Co–Constituted Worlds: The Age of Financialization? 185 5 Layering the Logics of Free Trade in Banking 187 6 Anaemic Geographies of Productive Finance 229 Afterword 275 Index 282

Brett Christophers  is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford, UK, British Columbia, Canada, and Auckland, New Zealand, and is the author of  Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth–Century British Columbia (1998) and Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (2009).

“Banking Across Boundaries should be read not just by economic geographers, political economists, or those concerned with the financial crisis, but by anyone who wants to understand key aspects of the “global” economy.”  ( Geographical Review , 16 December 2013) “This is a hugely ambitious, powerful and provocative book … Overall, this is an immensely impressive book. It provides a powerful demonstration of how political economic geographical analysis can operate through both the performative and material worlds of institutions, people, ideas, models and metrics … Brett Christophers has produced a compelling book that should be widely read in economic geography and across the social sciences.” Jane Pollard, Newcastle University, UK ( Progress in Human Geography book review symposium, 2013) “Christophers displays many of the skills required of a good detective, being both forensic in his approach and resolute in his persistence: his refusal to let claims go unchallenged or data unexamined is an admirable feature throughout … Clearly a major contribution to the field.” Andrew Leyshon, University of Nottingham, UK ( Progress in Human Geography book review symposium, 2013) “Christophers has written, first, a deeply informative and, second, a very gutsy account of the expansion, contraction, and once again expansion of international banking. The book is gutsy because Christophers challenges the common wisdom that capitalism has undergone a basic restructuring and become ‘financialized’. The challenge rests upon a foundation of quite extraordinary scholarship: it is impossible not to appreciate Christophers’ sustained engagement with banking’s centuries–long history and its extensive historical geography, too.” George Henderson, University of Minnesota, USA ( Progress in Human Geography book review symposium, 2013) “This is an immensely impressive … [and] compelling book that should be widely read in economic geography and across the social sciences … Christophers displays many of the skills required of a good detective, being both forensic in his approach and resolute in his persistence: his refusal to let claims go unchallenged or data unexamined is an admirable feature throughout … A deeply informative and … a very gutsy account of the expansion, contraction, and once again expansion of international banking.”   ( Progress in Human Geography , 1 September 2013) “Brett Christophers’ Banking Across Boundaries is one such contribution that will surely be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, from economic geography to international political economy and economic sociology.”  ( Regional Studies , 1 September 2013) “That said, and what is of particular interest here, is the way in which Banking Across Boundaries explicitly takes aim at performativity, a conceptual mainstay of the cultural economy of finance.”  (Journal of Cultural Economy , 22 March 2013)