Abstract

While a rich literature has examined how central banks mobilize narratives to enrol publics in monetary policymaking, the effects of the narratives deployed in banking supervision remain neglected. Drawing on 21 expert interviews, this paper fills that lacuna through a study of stress testing, a technique that became a fixture of international banking supervision after the 2008 crisis and which the Bank of England is using to align the risk management of the United Kingdom’s banks with its sense-making about emerging financial stability risks. I theorize the entanglements of the Bank’s financial stability narratives with binding supervisory requirements as giving rise to a new form of ‘infrastructural power’. This perspective explains why some financial sector actors see their decision-making autonomy being sapped away by the Bank’s stress tests even though they work through banks’ own risk sensitive calculative infrastructures. The paper’s findings also point to how the infrastructural affordances of central banks’ forward-looking narratives are pushing the temporal frontier of the state-economy boundary further into the future than has traditionally been considered an appropriate operational domain.

摘要

虽然大量文献研究了中央银行如何动员叙事以吸引公众参与货币政策制定，但在银行监管中部署的叙事的影响仍然被忽视。本文借鉴 21 位专家访谈，通过压力测试研究填补了这一空白，压力测试技术在 2008 年危机后成为国际银行监管的固定工具，英格兰银行正在使用该技术调整英国银行的风险管理其对新兴金融稳定风险的意义。我将银行的金融稳定叙述与具有约束力的监管要求的纠缠理论化为产生了一种新形式的“基础设施权力”。这种观点解释了为什么一些金融部门参与者看到他们的决策自主权被银行的压力测试削弱了，即使他们通过银行自己的风险敏感计算基础设施工作。该论文的研究结果还指出，中央银行前瞻性叙述的基础设施可供性如何将国家经济边界的时间边界推向未来，而不是传统上被认为是适当的操作领域。