Abstract
While a rich literature has examined how central banks mobilize narratives to enrol publics in monetary policymaking, the effects of the narratives deployed in banking supervision remain neglected. Drawing on 21 expert interviews, this paper fills that lacuna through a study of stress testing, a technique that became a fixture of international banking supervision after the 2008 crisis and which the Bank of England is using to align the risk management of the United Kingdom’s banks with its sense-making about emerging financial stability risks. I theorize the entanglements of the Bank’s financial stability narratives with binding supervisory requirements as giving rise to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’. This perspective explains why some financial sector actors see their decision-making autonomy being sapped away by the Bank’s stress tests even though they work through banks’ own risk sensitive calculative infrastructures. The paper’s findings also point to how the infrastructural affordances of central banks’ forward-looking narratives are pushing the temporal frontier of the state-economy boundary further into the future than has traditionally been considered an appropriate operational domain.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.