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Building resilient finance? Uncertainty, complexity, and resistance
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Brassett, James and Holmes, Christopher (2016) Building resilient finance? Uncertainty, complexity, and resistance. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 18 (2). pp. 370-388. doi:10.1177/1369148115615028 ISSN 1467-856X.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1369148115615028
Abstract
The article develops a critical analysis of the politics of financial resilience as an increasingly prevalent discourse of economic policy and practice. Against existing critiques of resilience which focus on the neoliberal rationalities and subjectivities that it (apparently) perpetuates, we argue that resilience per se does not—of necessity—infer any particular form of governance or subjectivity. Instead, resilience can be thought of as a sphere of political engagement. An emphasis on system, structure, and the relations between actors over time gives financial resilience a productive ambiguity: neither structure nor subject is ever fully defined and thus remains open. To this end, we engage the Bank of England’s recent turn to complexity modeling and its correlative, somewhat metaphorical, ethos of ‘clear thinking’ in ‘complex times’. This idea of complexity foregrounds the ‘unknown’ through positing the unpredictability of system-wide events; however, ensuing attempts to ‘model complexity’ entail a closure, rendering uncertainty ‘known’ in particular (and limited) ways. Indeed, we identify a general disconnect between the radical rhetoric of resilience agendas that emphasize complexity and the relative banality of resulting policy advice: self-regulation, capital ratios, and so on. We then explore how a focus on the ‘unknown’ can also give financial resilience an open quality, emphasizing the role of imagination and the diversity of agency. Put simply, if financial governance must be imagined, then it can be imagined differently. We therefore examine a set of everyday attempts to use the openness of resilience/complexity, in order to imagine finance in more democratic or communitarian terms. In particular, market formations such as local banking, peer lending, and wider attempts to politicize financial regulation through documentaries like Bank of Dave play on the productive ambiguities of financial resilience in critical ways. Such agendas do not exhaust or solve the dilemmas identified, but do represent a creative set of attempts to engage the politics of finance in inclusive, participatory, and reciprocal terms.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory | ||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Bank of England, Haldane, Andrew G. -- Influence, Financial crises -- Prevention, Macroeconomics | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | The British Journal of Politics and International Relations | ||||||
| Publisher: | Sage Publications Ltd | ||||||
| ISSN: | 1467-856X | ||||||
| Official Date: | 1 May 2016 | ||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 18 | ||||||
| Number: | 2 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 370-388 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1177/1369148115615028 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 2 May 2017 | ||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 3 May 2017 |
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