New book: ‘Securing Finance, Mobilizing Risk’

Securing Finance, Mobilizing Risk: Money Cultures at the Bank of England.
John Hogan Morris, Routledge/RIPE Studies in Global Political Economy 2018.

Drawing on the history of modern finance, as well as the sociology of money and risk, this book examines how cultural understandings of finance have contributed to the increased capitalization of the UK financial system following the Global Financial Crisis. Providing both a geographically-inflected analysis and re-appraisal of the concept of performativity, it demonstrates that financial risk management has a spatiality that helps to inform understandings and imaginaries of the risks associated with money and finance. The book traces the development of understandings of risk at the Bank of England, with an analysis that spans some 1,000 reports, documents and speeches alongside elite interviews with past and present employees at the central bank. Morris argues that the Bank has moved from a relatively broad-brush approach to the risks being managed in the financial sector, to a greater preoccupation with the understanding and mapping of the mobilization of financial risk.