Macroprudential expectations management

Contributing to understandings of regulatory authority and central bank expectations management, this chapter sets out the book’s main conceptual tools. Drawing on insights from financial geography, it provides a topological conceptualization of financial regulation and innovation to analyse the re-working of the Bank of England’s authority in relation to regulated banks. This chapter provides a cultural economy explanation of the Bank of England’s attempts to enrol risk calculations in the management of regulated banks’ expectations around central bank interventionism, macroprudential powers and policy instruments. Finally, this chapter foregrounds the active role Bank of England staff and calculative devices perform in different types of expectations management. It contends that the type of expectations management work undertaken depends on whether calculative practices involve intra-actions of calculative devices that are either conventional or guided by present and historical precedent, and macroprudential policy tools. As such, it offers a way of conceptualising the exercise of political authority through distributed forms of financial agency.