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one of the interesting problems with any reworking of the extant regulatory regime will be figuring out where to locate mechanisms that impinge on transnational financial flows.
the present regime was assembled ad hoc on the basis of the nation-state understood as a kind of natural horizon--i think this happened more or less organically because like (pace wittgenstein, by way of a graceless paraphrase)---> a curious feature of the most structuring of assumptions is that they do not strike you at all. they're knit into the framework that you impose on the environment, like an a priori. during the long, bloody history of the 20th century, across 3 world wars, nation-states were a baseline feature of capitalist ideology, a device which enabled self-location, the starting point for the ordering of propositions that replace increasingly experience-distant phenomena (by working them into a sequence and so generating a sense of machinery).
to regulate transnational capital flows requires breaking with that assumption concerning location. if the above is right, this poses a cognitive problem, so the outcomes will probably be backed into---it seems to me that the most logical way out of the present fiasco is the fashioning of some kind of transnational regulatory system, which requires institutions, which require some kind of legal authority.
for example, at the moment currency speculation seems to be a real problem, given that the players in that game are not from nowhere and do not operate without political assumptions and so react in ways that are ideologically structured to moves like, for example, the uk project of nationalizing the banking sector outright. the choices are either operate within the present regime, in which case the tanking of the pound will place a obvious limitation on regulatory choices, or change the way currencies operate. this might be a good time to resurrect the tobin tax idea--a tax on transnational currency movements the idea behind which was to create a disincentive for speculation.
but while that would slow down activity in currency markets, it wouldn't change the game. so changing the game seems more logical, as much as theater as anything else--because without such a move, "free markets" remain understood as natural formations at a point where that assumption is being dismantled in other areas. so the theater would be geared around a reassertion of the fact that currency markets are regulatory effects.
one option would be something like a new bretton woods arrangement---another would be the articulation of a different type of regulatory logic that operates at the transnational, rather than at the multinational, level. it could be instituted as a transitional regime, as an expedient that would enable states to operate with greater flexibility in elaborating a relation to capital flows that is a practical atomization of neoliberalism. but i think something like that needs to happen, or the process will be hamstrung from the outset.
i don't have an idea of content to this regime yet, though.
do you think this reasonable?
if so, what kind of currency regime would you think effective?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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