Regulatory Spaces in Global Finance.

Global finance has been significantly transformed from a 'Main Street model' that finances innovation and product manufacturing, so as to raise wages and stimulate demand, into a capital-accumulating 'Wall Street model' whose innovative capacity creates ever more sophisticated financial instruments and contracts that nurture financial speculation. This transformation, among others, entails both a shift from banking to shadow banking, that is, an upsurge of the sources of credit supply and the continual reshaping of the geographies of finance across all scales. Financial markets vary significantly in their geographies, marked by dynamics of both concentration and dispersion. Sophisticated technological infrastructures have greatly amplified the speed, volume and spatial reach of financial transactions. New demand for financial services, governments' thirst for funding and corporations' trawls for cheap financing fuelled the physical, virtual and economic expansion of the global financial markets. All this happened not least 'on the back of competition between financial centers' (Story and Lawton, 2010: 103), well-equipped with particular sets of regulations to attract and channel flows of money within the world economy, thus, creating and recreating 'regulatory spaces' (Hancher and Moran, 1989) of finance.