Credit Risk Transfer and Crunches: Global Finance Victorious or Vanquished?

Abstract

Rather than in terms of the inevitable demise of a destabilising process of speculation, this article explores the ‘credit crunch’ as a window on the fabrication, and measure of the proportions of a political shift driven by market actors and financial innovation. The Basel process reconceptualised banks as risk navigators and generated a competitive hierarchy within the global banking industry determined on a gauge of this capacity. This private regulatory regime promoted market inflation and rendered institutional liquidity and risk transfer definitive of market power. In turn, a ballooning credit derivatives market broke the limits of financial production and defined state actions in the face of crisis. A shift from a central concern with solvency to that of liquidity thinly masks a profound redistribution of power from the public to the private. By swapping private assets of uncertain value for government bonds, central banks have effectively recognised that the products of innovation in the private sphere are global money. The state is in a curious bind. It takes on limitless exposure to private liabilities while its reform agenda is constrained to calling for greater levels of transparency and tackling the worst excesses. Promises of substantive reform remain only that, reflecting dissonance between reality and an entrenched faith in a progressive innovation spiral.