The City: London and the Global Power of Finance by Tony Norfield

But, more fundamentally, finance is unreformable because it is an essential feature of capitalism. This allows financial institutions the ability to move between jurisdictions relatively easily, thus avoiding punitive measures. It is unreformable firstly for the more obvious reason that finance operates globally, with low levels of fixed capital. With great skill, Norfield demonstrates that the financial sector is unreformable. Accompanying these analyses have been feeble attempts by international institutions and national governments to introduce financial regulation. But all too often these arguments take on a reformist hue, suggesting that if only we could moderate the excesses of the financial sector then the type of collapse that the banking system went through in 2008, and the social disaster known as ‘austerity’ that followed, could in future be averted, leaving a nicer and crisis-free form of capitalism. This is somewhat understandable given the massive shift of wealth to the rich represented by the bank bailouts and ‘quantitative easing’, and in the academic world it has sometimes provided a fresh angle on increasingly turgid debates over the nature of neoliberalism. It has become fashionable amongst much of the left to take aim at both ‘finance’ and ‘financialisation’, particularly in the wake of the global crisis. For this you need Tony Norfield, whose book The City, based on his PhD research at SOAS, has just come out in hardback. Better still, ask an ex-banker who not only spent decades working in the dealing rooms of London’s financial district, but who is also a Marxist economist.

Tom Haines-Doran reviews ‘The City’ by Tony Norfield, recently published by Verso.ĭo you want to understand the City and how finance works in the British economy? Just ask an ex-banker.

Want to reform finance but maintain capitalism? Then you may have a problem.

The City: London and the Global Power of Finance by Tony Norfield