Domain Leader: Professor Jane Pollard

The 2008 financial crisis was a massive shake-up of the established economic order, generating challenges around the governance, mission and innovative capacity of finance and its geographies. As US and UK institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’ exposed the limits of orthodox economic ideas about ‘markets’ and their capacity to discipline economic agents, key debates for this Domain concern the governance of finance, as well as the (assumed) centrality of nation states and central banks in managing and restoring confidence in financial markets and institutions. As such, the Domain engages with a host of issues around:

• the social and economic mission of finance
• the role of finance as ‘master’ or ‘servant’ of productive capital in the ‘real’ economy
• financialisation as exclusion, and
• the scope for building socially useful financial products and capacities.

Financial innovations, like derivatives, which deconstruct ‘things’ into constituent elements before blending and reconfiguring them into a single measureable, tradable unit, pose substantial challenges to ideas about the ‘knowability’ of finance: its control, its measurement and its pricing. Likewise, such instruments connect and blend different times, spaces and risks in ways that transcend and challenge concepts like linear time, metaphors such as ‘flows’, and spatial imaginaries that ‘fix’ jurisdictions like ‘national’ and ‘offshore’.

How do the geographies of financial systems interact with other economic and social geographies?

How and for whom should financial markets be governed?

What opportunities and models exist for financial innovation to support models of inclusive growth?