Janine Wedel “Behind the Scenes of Inter­na­tional Bank­ing Reg­u­la­tion,” inter­view at the Insti­tute for New Eco­nomic Think­ing, Jan­u­ary 8, 2013
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Five years into the Great Reces­sion, dis­cus­sion and polit­i­cal fights con­tinue about the right approach to inter­na­tional bank­ing super­vi­sion. How to avert the next finan­cial cri­sis or at the very least lessen its damage?

Given the topic’s impor­tance, sur­pris­ing lit­tle research exists on the two insti­tu­tions that actu­ally set bank­ing stan­dards in prac­tice: the Basel Com­mit­tee and the Inter­na­tional Swaps and Deriv­a­tives Asso­ci­a­tion (ISDA) oper­ate at the heart of the sys­tem, set­ting cap­i­tal require­ments and stan­dard­iz­ing deriv­a­tive contracts.

Janine Wedel, Pro­fes­sor in the School of Pub­lic Pol­icy at George Mason Uni­ver­sity, sets out to fill this gap. Her research takes an anthro­po­log­i­cal approach to exam­ine the inner work­ings of these crit­i­cal insti­tu­tions. Through field­work and inter­views, she paints a pic­ture of infor­mal prac­tices and social net­works that per­me­ate inter­na­tional finance — an inves­ti­ga­tion into how real bank­ing reg­u­la­tion is done.