The Everyday Life of Global Finance Saving and Borrowing in Anglo-America

• Examines a range of financial issues of popular concern: consumer borrowing, the pensions crisis, the sub-prime mortgage finance, and the rise of mutual funds
• Challenges the perception that the global markets, such as Wall St. and the City of London, dominate financial trends
• Innovative contribution to the sociology of finance literature

In the US and UK, saving and borrowing routines have changed radically and become closely bound-up with the capital markets of global finance. As mutual funds have increased in popularity and pension provision has been transformed, many more individuals and households have come to invest in stocks and shares. As consumer borrowing has risen dramatically and mortgage finance has been extended to those deemed sub-prime, so the repayments of credit card holders and mortgagors have provided the basis for the issue and trading of bonds and other market instruments. 

The Everyday Life of Global Finance explores the unprecedented relationships that now bind society and the markets, challenging the dominant tendency to simply position recent developments in Wall Street and the City of London at the centre of contemporary finance. Grounded in literature from the sociology of finance and international political economy, drawing on the social theory of Callon, Foucault, and Latour, and informed by extensive empirical research, the book shows how global finance has become mundane and ordinary in Anglo-America. Finance is not 'out there somewhere', but is embedded in the calculative technologies and performances of reconfigured saving and borrowing networks, and is embodied through the assembly of everyday financial identities and self-disciplines. Society's new-found relationships with the financial markets are also shown, however, to be marked by stark inequalities, manifest contradictions, and political dissent. 

The Everyday Life of Global Finance is thus an ambitious and innovative contribution to our understanding of the contemporary financial world.

Readership: Academics, researchers, and advanced students across the social science interested in the making of the financial system, and the current financial crisis.