Municipal bonds are a financial instrument once largely limited to North America. Today, they are appearing in international development reports as a novel best-practice for closing the world's infrastructure funding gap and for promoting democracy. Critics of financialization have argued that municipal bonds have had the opposite effect: they have deepened austerity, ceded control of democratic municipalities to the global financial industry, and depoliticized public decision-making. Yet in this article, I observe a relationship between democracy, politics and finance which contrasts with the now common uses of ‘financialization’ popularized by critical scholars in Euro-American universities. I argue that, elsewhere in the world, capital markets have come to be understood as an important element of democratization. To make this argument, I develop the concept of ‘financial publics’—a group of strangers participating in a reflexive and reciprocal style of address through which they negotiate their financial relationships with one another. Using this concept, I analyze data drawn from over two years of ethnographic research on one of the most noteworthy experiments in municipal finance in the global South: the City of Dakar's failed attempt to issue the first ever municipal bond on the Regional Stock Exchange of West Africa.

中文翻译：

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反公共金融？市政债券市场的民主效应

市政债券是一种金融工具，曾经主要局限于北美。如今，它们作为缩小世界基础设施资金缺口和促进民主的新颖最佳实践出现在国际发展报告中。金融化的批评者认为，市政债券产生了相反的效果：它们加深了紧缩政策，将民主市政的控制权让给了全球金融业，并使公共决策去政治化。然而，在本文中，我观察到民主、政治和金融之间的关系，这与目前欧美大学批评学者所流行的“金融化”的普遍用法形成鲜明对比。我认为，在世界其他地方，资本市场已被理解为民主化的重要组成部分。为了提出这个论点，我提出了“金融公众”的概念——一群陌生人以一种反射性和互惠的方式参与其中，通过这种方式相互协商他们的金融关系。利用这个概念，我分析了两年多的人种学研究中得出的数据，该研究涉及南半球最值得关注的市政金融实验之一：达喀尔市试图在西部地区证券交易所发行首个市政债券，但失败了非洲。