Envisaging global balance-sheet capitalism: The Bank for International Settlements as a collective organic intellectual

Abstract

This article examines how the Bank for International Settlements, as a collective organic intellectual of finance capital, has sought to maintain the hegemony of financial globalization in the context of an increasingly fractured global order following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. I show how the Bank for International Settlements’ defence of financial globalization has pivoted around the construction of a new ‘economic imaginary’ of global capitalism in which the global financial cycle, which culminates in systemic financial crises, threatens economic and political stability. Asserting that this cycle can be ‘properly managed’, the Bank for International Settlements has advocated a set of formal shifts in macro-policy frameworks. Focusing on the temporality of economic governance as envisioned by the Bank for International Settlements, I highlight two important dimensions of the organization’s discourse: the reduction of policy to process and the fetishization of policy innovation. Here, the pursuit of principles of ‘good’ economic management is prioritized over the achievement of concrete economic or social outcomes. In traversing this economic imaginary, this article offers insights into how global capitalism and its management are envisioned by elites in the current period of hegemonic disorganization and political-economic turmoil.