Conservatives Versus Wildcats: A Sociology of Financial Conflict - Hardcover

Polillo, Simone

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804785090 ISBN 13: 9780804785099

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

For decades, the banking industry seemed to be a Swiss watch, quietly ticking along. But the recent financial crisis hints at the true nature of this sector. As Simone Polillo reveals in Conservatives Versus Wildcats, conflict is a driving force.

Conservative bankers strive to control money by allying themselves with political elites to restrict access to credit. Barriers to credit create social resistance, so rival bankers-wildcats-attempt to subvert the status quo by using money as a tool for breaking existing boundaries. For instance, wildcats may increase the circulation of existing currencies, incorporate new actors in financial markets, or produce altogether new financial instruments to create change.

Using examples from the economic and social histories of 19th-century America and Italy, two decentralized polities where challenges to sound banking originated from above and below, this book reveals the collective tactics that conservative bankers devise to legitimize strict boundaries around credit-and the transgressive strategies that wildcat bankers employ in their challenge to this restrictive stance.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Simone Polillo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. With Brad Pasanek, he is co-editor of Beyond Liquidity: The Metaphor of Money in Financial Crisis.

Simone Polillo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. With Brad Pasanek, he is co-editor of Beyond Liquidity: The Metaphor of Money in Financial Crisis.

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Conservatives Versus Wildcats

A Sociology of Financial Conflict

By Simone Polillo

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8509-9

Contents

Prologue...................................................................
vii
Introduction...............................................................
1
1 Money, Banks, and Creditworthiness: Three Myths?.........................
22
2 Banking and Finance as Organized Conflict................................
43
3 Institutions and the Struggle over Creditworthiness in the 
Nineteenth-Century United States...........................................
71
4 Wildcats, Reputations, and the Formation of the Federal Reserve..........
105
5 Italian Elites and the Centralization of Creditworthiness................
146
6 Italian Creditworthiness: From Central to National.......................
182
7 Conclusions..............................................................
212
Appendix,..................................................................
231
Notes,.....................................................................
235
References,................................................................
259
Acknowledgments,...........................................................
283
Index,.....................................................................
285

CHAPTER 1

Money, Banks, and CreditworthinessThree Myths?

THREE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTIONS characterize scholarly understandingsof money, banks, and creditworthiness, and in what followsI will, perhaps a bit irreverently, refer to them as myths. The first mythdepicts money as a neutral means of accounting for value—as a fungibleinstrument that serves to establish commensurability among qualitativelydifferent commodities. The second myth depicts banks as institutions ofintermediation; it sees them as responsible for the allocation and distributionof scarce financial resources (capital), so that banks intermediatebetween savers and spenders. Finally, the myth of creditworthiness as objectiveassessment understands the criteria by which borrowers are grantedcredit to be a function of the traits of the borrower: the better these criteriacapture such underlying traits, the better the odds that the financial obligationwill be met in the future.

Understanding the nature of these myths, I claim, is essential forunderstanding the conflictual nature of finance. There are three reasons:(1) money can reflect both a logic of inclusion and one of exclusion; it isboth fungible and incommensurable. (2) Banks do not move resources,but create financial claims whose circulation they strive to restrict to certaincircuits. (3) The criteria whereby creditworthiness is adjudicated servenot to capture some objective trait in the borrower, but to create collectiveidentities to which both bankers and their clients must commit. Bycommitting, they can continue exploiting opportunities and restrictingaccess to advantages to their own status group. Therefore, money, credit,and creditworthiness are always contested, with certain bankers strivingto reinforce the boundaries drawn around each phenomenon, while otherbankers strive to transgress those boundaries. The myths of fungiblemoney, of banks as institutions of intermediation, and of creditworthinessas objective assessment, are categories of practice rather than analyticalcategories; they emerge in the course of financial struggle to abet the politicalprojects of conflicting banking groups. This makes conflict centralto the nature of finance in the capitalist process, and recurrent claims toinclusion and exclusion intrinsic to financial exchange. This chapter investigatesthe nature of each myth in some depth.

The Myth of Fungible Money

A new sociological literature, emerging over the past twenty years,explores whether money is a set of financial and monetary instrumentsthat are only potentially commensurable with one another, or an abstractsystem of accounting for value that generates equivalences and commensurabilitythrough the quantification of value. Here I will claim that thefirst claim is more accurate than the second. Money takes specific forms,which then signal something about their possessor to other financial players:they signal membership in financial communities variably characterizedby exclusivity and control. As a consequence, specifically, the possessorsof specific financial instruments gain access to particular financialexperiences, as well as to common identities that commit them to collectiveenterprises. In order to understand the importance of this claim wemust begin by questioning the fungible status of money.

What I call the myth of fungible money derives from a large, mostlypolemical literature, dating back to the writings of Karl Marx and GeorgSimmel, that identifies in money the power of transcending any and allsocial boundaries that individuals may erect to contain its spread—andthe spread of commercialization and cold calculation that money bringswith it. Non olet, money does not smell (1921: 124), as Marx put it, referringto Roman emperor Vespasian's quip upon imposing a tax on publiclavatories: for Marx, money is a "universal equivalent," deriving its powerprecisely from its detachment from commodities, rather than from its origins,no matter how undignified they might be.

Simmel joins Marx in thinking of money as anonymous and depersonalized.But he pushes the idea of the transformative power of money ina different direction from Marx, to argue that money is freedom, a freedom that entails a high cost: "[M]odern man is free, free because he cansell everything, and free because he can buy everything.... [T]hroughmoney, man is no longer enslaved in things, so on the other hand is thecontent of his Ego, motivation and determination so much identical withconcrete possessions that the constant selling and exchanging of them—eventhe mere fact that they are saleable—often means a selling and uprootingof personal values" (Simmel 1990: 404).

With money comes modernity (Poggi 1993), and in particular, detachmentfrom more traditional sources of authority and identity. A similartheme is later also developed by anthropologists witnessing the transitionto market economies in non-Western societies, where, with the advent ofcolonialism and capitalism, "special monies" were allegedly being replacedby generalized monies (Bohannan 1959). The idea that money is "special"conveys how the different kinds of monetary tokens that pre-existed themarket economy circulated in restricted spheres of exchange—characterizedby specific obligations and loyalties, and never by a market logic offree exchange. The advent of modern money, by virtue of its neutrality tovalues and social attachments, is understood as a break in those circuits,signaling the beginning of an era of generalized, market-based exchange(Polanyi 1944; Parry and Bloch 1989).

Marx and Simmel, and later economic anthropologists, in short,make fundamental contributions to a tradition of thinking of money asa "cold cash nexus" that dehumanizes social relations, deprives them ofcontent and emotion, and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804785090
• ISBN 13: 9780804785099
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande