Friday, February 19th 2-4pm
Aaron Major - Global Governance
in a Neoliberal Context: The Case of
the Basel Capital Accord
Since the early 1970s, the number of transnational bodies with mandates to maintain global financial stability has increased dramatically. Yet, this vast, and growing, institutional apparatus appears powerless to exert any kind of order over global financial markets. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 and, most pressing, the global financial crisis that unfolded in 2008 highlight the weakness of the transnational institutional apparatus for regulating global finance. This weakness, I argue, stems from the neoliberalization of the institutions of transnational economic governance. In this paper I follow those scholars who understand neoliberalization as a process of institutional reconfiguration under the weight of a powerful discourse that is distrustful of the state, and other forms of regulation over the economy. Faced with these ideological pressures, institutions of economic governance have had to find new ways to regulate economic activities that are obscured, depoliticized, and highly technocratic. I advance this claim through a detailed, and critical, comparison of the Basel Capital Accord–one of the most significant efforts at transnational economic regulation that has been put in place over the last thirty years–and the Bretton Woods system. Drawing on new archival materials from the OECD I emphasize key differences in the institutional structure of the two systems. Drawing on new archival materials from the OECD I emphasize key differences in the institutional structure of the two systems.