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date: 27 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article examines the constitutive elements of global finance, and specifically high finance. It argues that global finance has debordered the narrowly defined notion of financial firms and markets, and financial institutions generally. The first section examines the different organizing logic of Bretton Woods internationalism from that of the post-1980s global era. The second section examines the organizing logic of the post-1980s era. The third section discusses the major growth patterns and conditions for growth of the post-1980s financial system, which brings to the fore the differences between finance and other economic sectors. The fourth section examines the slippery relation between finance and exchanges and, more generally, financial centres, both of which are institutionalized spaces rather than institutions per se. This issues is examined through the problem of ‘incomplete knowledge’ facing all firms and investors in market economies, and the role of financial centres in making knowledge; in the case of finance, the problem of ‘incomplete knowledge’ can become acute given the velocities and orders of magnitude involved.

Keywords: global financial system, high finance, financial firms, Bretton Woods internationalism, financial centres, exchanges, incomplete knowledge

Saskia Sassen

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and the co-chairs Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: from Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton Universtiy Press 2008), A Sociology of Globalization (W. W. Norton 2007), and the 4th-fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2011). The Global City came out in a new fully updated in 2001. Her books are translated into twenty-one languages. She is currently working on When Territory Exits Existing Frameworks (under contract with Harward University Press). She contributes regularly to www.Opendemocracy.net

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