Markets as Politics: The Case of BCCI

• In Event: 473 - Section on Political Economy of the World-System Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Markets and Economics

Abstract

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) has been considered the world’s most corrupt bank. In this paper, I used economic sociology and political economy to move beyond what I call the scandal view of BCCI and consider its innovative and generative roles. First, BCCI presented itself as a Third World bank and as a genuinely global bank, and many individuals understood BCCI in this way. Here, I examine BCCI as an agent of economic globalization and generator of the field of global banking. Second, inspired by the work of Simone Polillo (2011), I examine BCCI bankers as Populist Innovators (PIs), experimenting with innovative financial instruments as part of a political and ideological project to include the Third World in circuits of finance. In the case of BCCI, the existing large international banks and the governments of their home territories responded to the threat of BCCI’s innovation with accusations of corruption and successfully closed BCCI. Third, this emerging and conflictual field of global banking – and the shutdown of BCCI – must be understood within the rapidly changing political economic context of the end of the Cold War. This political economic context reshaped global banking in ways confirming Fligstein’s “Markets as Politics.”

Author

• Johanna K. Bockman, George Mason University