Description

T is essay examines the questions raised by the present fi nancial crisis through an enquiry into the institutional foundations of American fi nance. We view with some scepticism strong claims concerning the disastrous outcome for the structural dynamism of the global fi nancial system and America’s position in it. Many critical political economists tend to take the system of global fi nancial markets as their point of departure and then locate the US in this system. Such approaches, however, generally fail to do justice to the decades-long build up of US fi nancial power and do not capture many of the organic institutional linkages through which the American state is connected to the world of global fi nance and which are responsible for its imperial sprawl. In many ways, fi nancial globalisation is not best understood as the re-emergence of international fi nance but, rather, as a process through which the expansionary dynamics of American fi nance took on global dimensions. Because the present system of global fi nance has been shaped so profoundly by specifi cally American institutions and practices, it will not do to evaluate the changes and transformations of this system on the basis of either an abstract, generic model of capitalism or mere extrapolations from conjunctural crises. Crisis and instability are part and parcel of the dynamics of imperial fi nance and so are the managerial capacities developed by the US state. T e most important questions that should occupy critical political economists therefore have to do not with what appear to be external challenges to US fi nancial power (or the putative opportunities for progressive change opened up by them), but, rather, relate to the ways in which the imperial network of intricate, complex and often opaque institutional linkages between the US state and global fi nance is managed and reproduced.