Developing geographies of financialisation: banking the poor and remittance securitisation

Abstract

International remittances are the income that workers manage to send home. This article examines these flows in relation to an emerging geography of financialisation. It is possible to recognise two distinct types of financialisation; firstly, financialisation is extended through the expansion of retail finance on the back of remittance flows, and secondly, via the securitisation of remittance flows. The article argues that the financialisation of remittances is driven by the need to appropriate what were previously private and informal flows and bring them into the ‘global development architecture’. This is done so under the premise of a crisis of development financing. The subsequent analysis confirms five key points about financialisation: (1) financialisation processes are to be found outside the advanced industrial economies and the literature needs to acknowledge this; (2) financialisation is intimately bound up with political agency and is not simply a financial logic; (3) financialisation is constituted in and through discourses and is not just a historical marker between regimes of accumulation: the narration of crisis is crucial in constituting remittances as source of development finance; (4) even the most exotic elements of finance continue to rely upon income streams to be found in the everyday economy: financialisation is not a simple story of disembedding; and (5) financialisation is confirmed as an inherently contradictory process which produces antimonies and infelicities.

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