International Financial Governance in Hard Times. Tracing the Transformations

The paper reviews the tenets of the intellectual consensus on how to organize the international financial system that came to crystallize at the end of the 1990s and the contestation of such a consensus in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Illustrating the path of ideational transformation from the early 1990s till present, the paper builds on recent constructivist works in international political economy (IPE) that take economic ideas held by agents as the principal unit of analysis. In doing so, the paper brings to the surface both the substantive changes that had taken place in the principles underlying the governance of the international financial system and the dynamics of ideational change. Specifically, the paper suggests a shift away from a governance project based on the dispersion of supervisory authority and finds that new policy ideas of regulation and political centralization have all been conceived with negative reference to the past.