Regul(ariz)ation of Fringe Credit: Payday Lending and the Borders of Global Financial Practice

Abstract

The recent financial crisis has been punctuated by a discussion of the future of global financial governance in terms of a ‘regulation/deregulation’ formula. This paper argues for a broadening of this frame by taking seriously recent claims of performativity. To place changes associated with financial globalization in a more complicated critical context, this paper explores the ways in which global finance has often entailed a redrawing of the boundaries between the financial and the everyday. To develop this argument, the paper focuses, in particular, on practices of payday lending and on recent regulatory changes which have performed payday lending in a particular set of ways. Reading payday lending as both a repertoire of market devices and a set of dividing practices, this paper concludes that regulation performs the object it seeks to manage by invoking ambiguous, and not singular, territories of governance.