Fringe Finance: Crossing and Contesting the Borders of Global Capital by Rob Aitken

Author:Rob Aitken [Aitken, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317748373
Google: vlWhBgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18607514
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part II

Fringe finance as a social practice

5 Making regular

Fringe-lending as a formal practice

In 1898, Hoyle, a savage critic of New York’s financial interests, wrote a striking critique of the ways in which ‘Wall Street operators’ were increasingly able to disguise what he perceived as their essentially immoral practices within a cleverly constituted set of ‘dignified headings’. ‘We know’, Hoyle pointed out, ‘that the men who live in uptown mansions and belong to uptown churches think themselves to be, and want the world to consider them as “financiers”’ (Hoyle 1899: 11). Despite this attempt to conceal themselves in the symbolic gestures of dignified life, Hoyle was still able to name Wall Street operators for what he thought they were. ‘These men and their silent partners’, he concluded, ‘are the managers of the most stupendous gambling game the world has ever seen … a game that has its daily doings reported free of charge and at great length in every prominent newspaper in the country under the heading of “Financial Markets” or “Wall Street Doings” or some other dignified heading’ (Hoyle 1898: 11). For Hoyle, even though Wall Street was clearly associated with dubious political and social pursuits, it was able nonetheless to cleanse itself by cultivating the endorsement of legitimate adornment. Key to the power of finance, for Hoyle, is its sanctioned claim to formal legitimacy; a claim made real in its cultivated associations with a culture of legitimate social life. Hoyle’s assessment, I want to suggest in this chapter, offers an important signal of the kinds of cultural crucibles that the practices of fringe finance occupy. As Chapter 4 has argued, although finance appears in our political present as a scientific, rational and, by extension, legitimate practice, genealogies of finance reveal it to be a category long subject to contestations regarding its association with (and disentanglement from) dubious political, ethical or social practices: whimsy, irrationality, emotion, chance and, perhaps most importantly, gaming.

As Hoyle suggests, the settling of finance as a rational category is bound up in the ways in which it claims a certain kind of projected legitimacy. This chapter expands on Hoyle’s assessment by noting the ways in which the legal and regulatory debates around fringe lending place particular emphasis on issues of formal legitimacy. Over the past decade there have been serious regulatory discussions about fringe lending: in the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and at the European Union. One of the reasons that these various discussions have been important is because they have featured prominent debates about the very borders of finance: questions about where the borders of legitimate and permissible finance should lie. These questions have most importantly been taken up in relation to issues regarding the formalization of fringe lending – the legal settling of a category of credit practices often categorized as predatory, usurious, harmful, illegal or, in some cases, criminal. The central claim of this chapter is that the regulatory and political debates around micro-lending have become an emblematic contemporary site where the legitimate and legal borders of finance are contested, shaped and reworked.

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