Becoming (Un)Stable:
Twenty Years of Financial Stability Governance at the Bank of England

Abstract

This thesis is the first critical social scientific study of a central bank’s financial stability agenda, in this case the Bank of England. The study is broadly situated in a trajectory of research into geographies of money and finance that is concerned with global financial processes, opening up the black box of institutional practices and the interaction between discourse and the economy. More specifically, the thesis contributes a Deleuzian cultural economy and three key concepts as a means for interrogating the financial stability practices of the central bank in question: assemblage, performativity and (in)stability. The methodology of the thesis has involved creating a financial stability archive from some 2000 documents, texts and videos publically available on the Bank of England website. Texts within this archive were read in a consistent and rigorous way, drawing on a grounded theory approach that was ‘somewhere between abduction and deduction’ (Crang 2003: 132). And, finally, the empirical contribution of the thesis is concerned with financial stability techniques and develops across five chapters concerned, respectively, with press conferences, credit derivatives, Value-at Risk, stress testing and confidence.