Fragile Boundaries. The Power of Global Finance and the Weakness of Political Institutions

The debate about the current financial crisis focuses mainly on how to regulate financial markets by means of appropriate policies in order to avoid further and future crises and instabilities. This article explores a preliminary question, namely whether global finance can be really governed. Given that a pronounced imbalance exists between the power resources of national and international political institutions and those of global finance, the answer to this question is substantially negative. There are structural factors that make, on the one side, global finance ungovernable and, on the other, national government policies dependent on markets’ approval. Hence, a paradigm change is required, namely a shift from regulative to limitative policies. These are public policies aimed at redistributing power resources from global finance to national governments and international institutions.