Item

Abstract

Money markets are at the heart of financialized capitalism, as those markets that
provide the funding liquidity needed for credit creation and leveraged trading. How
have these markets evolved, grown, and become critical for larger financial flows? To
answer this question, I distinguish an early period of financial globalization marked by
regulatory arbitrage, offshoring, deregulation, and informal trading practices from a
period of regime-consolidation marked by formal institutionalization. Concentrating on
repo markets as the key funding sources for market-based banking, I demonstrate that
new institutional arrangements for these markets were initiated by private sector
associations, but supported and authorized by public authorities. Bond trader groups
codified new contractual arrangements and these were validated via reforms of bankruptcy
codes and changes in central banks’ policy frameworks in the United States and
European Union. Through these modifications and re-articulations in institutional
conditions, transactions and large exposures on money markets became routine
affairs—for shadow banking actors like money market funds as well as for commercial
banks. The article concludes by discussing the continuity of regime-consolidation
efforts after the transatlantic financial crisis and hypothesizes that they reveal “neopatrimonial” features.