The changing spatial arrangements of global finance: Financial, social and legal infrastructures

Abstract

The spatial arrangements of global finance have changed significantly over the last 30 years, entangling new actors, relations and sites. Infrastructures have developed to stabilize change and complexity. The collection advocates for a broader understanding of infrastructures that includes – but moves beyond – supporting technologies of Bloomberg terminals, telephony, and high-speed cabling. In particular, it highlights other infrastructural forms: financial institutions which govern and steer market action, social networks which organize financial practices and reproduce status-based power asymmetries and legal treatments which work across jurisdictions to open up opportunities for actors to innovate or avoid costs. This theme issue highlights how these different infrastructural forms support both changes and continuities in the global financial system and thus contributes to the literature on financialization, global financial networks and global wealth chains.