ABSTRACT
After the global financial crisis and public outcry at excessive government largesse towards the banks, transnational economic elites – principally from G7 nations – were forced to consider new strategies for containing future systemic risk in the global financial system. The financial crisis revealed how ‘rapid financial innovation during an era of prolonged macroeconomic stability had resulted in a highly complex and interconnected system that was inadequately understood by regulators’ (Gai 2013: 1). Financial systems manifest what Gai terms a ‘robust-yet-fragile’ constitution: ‘while the probability of contagion may be low, the effects can be extremely widespread when problems occur’ (ibid.: 11). But while the detail of new regulation regimes must be understood and evaluated, a deeper issue also concerns us here. It is the thesis of the present study that risk management strategies developed since 2008 reflect not only the issue of systemic risk but also a more fundamental change in the legal organization of postliberal capitalism itself. This in turn reflects, at a broader level, the ongoing development of global governance as an elite response to the structural crisis of globalizing capital which has, since the financial crises of the late 1990s, led to a major consolidation of transnational co-governance in elite forums like the G20, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), the functions of which are to stabilize rather than transform a global finance-led accumulation regime (Decker & Sablowksi 2017). The strategic intention of the new regulatory framework is to mitigate risk and address instabilities created by contradictory pressures in transnational capitalism between global integration and the fragmentation/hierarchization of the international economy into segmented networks of capital flows, information flows, commodity and value 171chains connecting financial centres and consumer markets in G20 economies with low-wage manufacturing and commodity-rich zones in the periphery.
