Regulating Financial Derivatives? Risks, Contested Values, and Uncertain Futures

Abstract

This article engages with debates concerning the regulation of financial derivatives and, in particular, with the assumption according to which their speculative ‘excesses’ can be effectively curbed so to restore an otherwise healthy system of production, usually the industrial/manufacturing one, endowed with a ‘real’ value separate from that produced by financial markets. Arguing that derivatives complicate such an assumption, the article asks the question of how to act when the ‘value’ they refer to becomes contested. In this respect it explores the potential of the Ecuadorian Proposal for a New Regional Financial Architecture to act in the face of the contestability of value of exchange rates and, in so doing, to represent an alternative to the real/financial economy split and the regulatory debate as carried out so far.