Grey matter in shadow banking: international organizations and expert strategies in global financial governance

Abstract

Who controls global policy debates on shadow banking regulation? We show how experts secured control over how issues in shadow banking regulation are treated by examining the policy recommendations of the Bank of International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board. The evidence suggests that IO experts embedded a bland reformism opposed to both strong and 'light touch' regulation at the core of the emerging regulatory regime. Technocrats reinforced each other's expertise, excluded some potential competitors (legal scholars), coopted others (select Fed and elite academic economists), and deployed measurement, mandate, and status strategies to assert issue control. In the field of shadow banking regulation, academic economists' influence came from their credibility as arbitrageurs between several professional fields rather than their intellectual output. The findings have important implications for how we study the relationship between IO technocrats and experts from other professional fields.

IMF flexibility or neoliberal adaptation: A discursive content analysis of Article IV policy biases in Argentina

“…808–809; Hay & Smith, ). Of relevance to this observed shift is Ban et al's () conceptualization of a “neoliberal nebula.” Effectively, this concept helps identify (via shorthand) policy preferences/logics drawing from various schools—namely, classical‐liberalism, monetarism, and New Keynesianism—as part of a “neoliberal family,” within a broader economic taxonomy. In attempts to further apprehend the concept, Ban posits that neoliberal theories or policy paradigms can be characteristically defined or identified as those having “a strong preference for credibility‐maintaining low inflation and budget deficits [and price stability] supersedes concerns about unemployment, leaving labor market liberalization (rather than demand‐side policies) to deal with sluggish growth and job performance” (Ban, ; Momani & Hibben, , p. 213).…”

The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund

“…The article builds on the state of the art on the sociology of professions and international organizations when it conceives of the corps of economists shaping the policy doctrines of the ECB and the IMF as transnational ‘issue professionals’ who assert scientific authority and enrol the ideas and professional prestige of sympathetic interlocutors in order to gain legitimacy, establish cognitive dominance over certain policy niches (‘issue control’) and, consequently, smooth the acts of transnational administration (Henriksen and Seabrooke ; Seabrooke and Henriksen ). While the existing scholarship on this linkage shows that such activities of issue professionals create incentives for them to exploit both the intellectual shifts and the intellectual status quo in elite niches of academic economics (Chwieroth ; Ban , ; Ban et al ; Clift ; Grabel ), the professional terrain where scientific authority originates (Fourcade ), this article advances the state of the art by looking beyond academic economics and into other fields of economic expertise ranging from the private sector to think‐tanks.…”

How Do Ideas Shape National Preferences? The Financial Transaction Tax in Ireland

“…This third dimension of power points toward a means of exercising influence that is both institutionally routinized and that is based on an ideational interpretation of how the world works that shapes the expectations of the various actors. Power of this sort may be exercised through holding a monopoly on relevant knowledge, as in the case of the opaque practices of the shadow banking sector or the development of complex investment products (Young and Pagliari 2017, Ban and Gabor 2016, Ban, Seabrooke, and Freitas 2016, Ban and Gabor 2017. We are interested in understanding the influence of the financial sector over policy on the European FTT though, and this does not, on the whole, involve specialist or insider knowledge.…”