Paper short abstract:

Global finance is often characterized as a realm that supersedes the nation-state, but multinational banking statistics produce specific geographies that are both national and gobalized. Attention to the infrastructural work of valuation can help to specify these spaces of global capital flows.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we argue that attention to the infrastructural work of statistical valuation can help to specify the spaces of capital flows. Global finance is often characterized as a realm that supersedes the nation-state. In contrast, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and document analysis, we show that financial statistics produce specific geographies that are both national and gobalized, and that these are intrinsically related to statistical determinations of value. So global statistics are infused with national valuation techniques of the sort that globalization was supposed to render obsolete.

Statistical infrastructures facilitate the circulation of capital that, with the rise of financialization, has become increasingly central to daily life. The BIS is one of the world's premier financial monitors, and nations are integral to their classification of multinational banks. This article analyzes two sets of distinctions in BIS banking statistics: first, between bank nationality and residency, and second, between domestic, international, local, foreign and/or cross-border claims.

These distinctions change depending on who observes them (Esposito 2013) and where they are reported. So, rather than a view from nowhere (Haraway 1988) or a deterritorialized space of flows (Castells 1998), BIS statistics rely upon a grounded view of capital as a substance that flows through discrete passages (P. Peters, Kloppenburg, and Wyatt 2010) or channels (Tsing 2000). The globalization that emerges can be viewed as a form of infrastructural globalism (Edwards 2006) that complexly incorporates the nation-state.