Financial derivatives and the rise of circulation
The socio-structural genesis of circulation
The explosive rise of short-term speculative capital, embodied in and animated
by the circulation of the risk-bearing derivative, seems to reflect, amplify and arise
from ongoing transformations in the basic socio-structures of the globalizing economy
(Eatwell and Taylor 2002). This much more than economic transformation turns on
the evolving relationship between the rising importance of circulation and the
development of financial institutions and instruments that specialize in the
circulations of capital (Pryke and Allen 2000). It appears that the internal dynamic of
modern capitalism that compels it to drive towards higher, more globally
encompassing levels of production seems to be generating such progressively
ascending levels of complexity that connectivity itself is becoming a socio-structuring
value. Though it went unnoticed at the time, beginning in the 1970s EuroAmerican
industrial manufacturing had begun to exhaust much of its productive potential
(Brenner 1998) and to require a spatial remedy or a ‘fix’ (Harvey 2000: xxx; James
2001: 204). Industries of many types needed to discover new ways to incorporate
more marginal regions (particularly South Asia) to shore up critical contradictions
instigated by its compulsion to overproduce goods and over-accumulate capital. As
Spiro (1999) has shown, EuroAmerican capitalism was generating and absorbing
(especially from OPEC members) more capital than it could profitably reinvest in the