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Introduction
Although the current world economic crisis has already celebrated its fifth anniversary, we still don't know whether the worst is yet to come. It has certainly outgrown the Asian Crisis and is easily on par with the Great Depression. Whatever the post-crisis economic world will look like, the crisis will certainly be remembered as one of the key moments in the history of financial markets.1 Thus, it is even more surprising that the very system that led to the crisis is still operational. Where are the major institutional changes that are usually associated with systemic crises? Remember the proposals for a new financial architecture that circulated around back in 2008? They all somehow disappeared. Instead, we hear the same arguments, the same stories, and the same proposed solutions as after the Asian Crisis: more transparency, more data, higher standards, and more austerity.2 Of course, this does not mean nothing has been done. Quite to the contrary: Basle III is agreed, the G20 replaced the G8, the Financial Stability Forum has been promoted to the Financial Stability Board; there are a couple of cuts in bonuses, and a new set of transparency and standardisation initiatives are well under way.
However, instead of an emerging alternative or paradigm of global finance, we see a perpetuation of monetarist ideas: the driving force behind current reforms is not a search for an institutional alternative, but a search for technical fixes based on the belief that the current crisis results from some lack of regulation. According to the G20, the IMF, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the Bank for International Settlement (BIS), the assemblage of new actors, financial instruments, and practices like securitisation led to an unprecedented situation where actors and regulatory authorities simply were unable to calculate risk exposures.3 The reform debate is shot through with references to exogenous shocks, asymmetric information, or mistakes or failures that externalise the source of crises: a crisis is not an in-built phenomena of financial practices, but the unfortunate result of 'information gaps' and 'failures' demanding new and better data and higher standards. To understand crises as 'exceptions', as a failure, presupposes and perpetuates the efficient market hypothesis, that 'under...