Banking Across Boundaries (eBook)

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).

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

"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)



'An innovative, well-researched and invaluable book on the importance of banks and banking to contemporary capitalism. The vital importance of their cross-boundary activity and the controversy over whether and how they really do contribute to the wealth of nations are here illuminated in novel ways.'--David Harvey, Distinguished Professor, City University of New York

'A trenchant, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the reciprocal relationship between economic ideas and material developments in banking and finance. In a book sure to make economists and ordinary citizens rethink the recent financial crisis, Christophers demands that we take the long historical view and place national economies in a global context. This is a fresh, exciting, and probing call for more expansive frames of economic analysis and more critical reflection on the data that allow us to know what we think we know about productivity and finance.'--Mary Poovey, Samuel Rudin University Professor in the Humanities, New York University

'In Banking Across Boundaries Brett Christophers walks us through a history of capitalism that considers the importance of how financial intermediation is counted in economic geographies. Crucial here is the evolution of banks' spatial anatomy and conceptions of banks' economic productiveness. Explained over three periods of capitalist development, Christophers does a splendid job in detailing how ideas and practices enable one another in how banks operate across boundaries and why they are considered to be productive in modern national accounting. This book is of great interest to all scholars of finance in the international political economy.'--Leonard Seabrooke, Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology, Copenhagen Business School