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Webber, 2001; Rock, 2002). These crises have
often been caused by the movement ofhot
money, which moves in but, significantly,
also out of economies at short notice in search
of investment opportunities. Growing atten-
tion is being paid to such investors, such as
hedge funds and pension funds, which control
large volumes ofcapitalin circulation within
the global economy. For example, Clark
(1999a) has argued that the current era is
characterized by ‘pension fund capitalism’.
The rise of these institutions has coincided
with the retreat of the state, particularly
within Anglo-American economies. As voters
have demonstrated their unwillingness to pay
the taxes that would fund social welfare pro-
grammes and publicinfrastructuredevelop-
ment, so large institutional investors have
moved in to fill the gap, footing the bill, but
for private gain. This has implications not only
for what kind of infrastructure is built, but also
for how it is run. Similar arguments about the
growing power and influence of the financial
system have been made in a body of work that
emerged in the early twenty-first century,
which has a focus on the process offinanciali-
zation, which has focused on the ways in which
money and finance has been colonizing eco-
nomic life, both in the boardroom (Froud,
Sukhdev, Leaver and Williams, 2006) and in
thehousehold(Langley, 2004, 2006).
A second area of research has focused on the
regional effects of money and finance, mainly
through the impacts of the reorganization of
the financial services industry. Since the
1970s, and working in parallel to, and com-
bination with, the process of financialization,
there has been a process of neo-liberalization
that has brought about a wave of financial
re-regulation to economies in North America,
Europe and South East Asia (Moran, 1991,
2003; Dymski, 1999). These developments
have brought about an increase in retail finan-
cial services employment, and economic geog-
raphers have documented and explained these
uneven geographies of growth (Leyshon,
Thrift and Toomey, 1989; Richardson, Belt
and Marshall, 2000) (seeneo-liberalism).
A third area of work has focused on the
urban dynamics of money. One strand of
research has sought to explain the persistence
of financial centres in an era of time–space
compression. Geographers have sought to
explain why financial centres such as the City
of London and New York continue to control
the majority of the world’s financial activity
(Thrift, 1994a; Agnes, 2000; Clark and Woj-
cik, 2001). The answer is to be found in theways financial centres facilitate close interper-
sonal contact through episodes of co-presence.
This facilitates the rapid generation, capture
interpretation and representation of business
information (Boden and Molotch, 1995;
Boden, 2000). The financial centre may there-
fore be seen as a collective way of coping with
the vast amount of monetary information that
circulates within the global economy. It is a
centre of financial expertise founded in a com-
plexdivision of labourembodied in the skills
of the workforce, technology, and textual ma-
terial (Thrift, 1994a), and which collectively
generates and disseminates financial informa-
tion as well as interpretations and narratives
about what this information actually means.
This is the reason why it is unlikely that finan-
cial centres ‘will simply melt away into a gen-
eralised ‘‘space offlows’’ ... leaving money
obligations to speed their way along the cables
and through the aether [sic], to and from
many different terminals located in places’
across the global economy (Thrift, 1994a,
p. 327). A second strand of research focuses
on the urban dynamics of money upon spaces
offinancial exclusion, the process by which
people of poor and moderate incomes are dir-
ectly and indirectly excluded from the formal
financial system and denied access to main-
stream retail financial services (Leyshon, Bur-
ton, Knights, Alferoff and Signoretta 2004a;
Dymski, 2005).
A fourth area of research has focused on
geographies of money as they are played out
through institutions and individual actors. A
particular focus of this work has been on the
bodiesthat perform tasks in the service of the
financial system. This work has focused in the
main on the changing ‘gendercultures’ of
financial institutions (Jones, 1998), such as
the transformation of cultures of paternalistic
masculinity within British retail banking
(Halford and Savage, 1995), and analyses of
labour marketsegregation within the City of
London, and the ways in which highly paid
jobs in corporate finance and trading are
implicitly and explicitly coded as masculine.
A fifth and final area of research has been
that which has focused on local currency sys-
tems, such as Local Exchange and Trading
Systems (Lee, 1996; Lee, Leyshon, Aldridge,
Tooke, Williams and Thrift, 2004). This
work, influenced by debates on diverse oral-
ternative economies, has sought to explore
the moral geographies of money and ex-
change, and the possibilities of local commu-
nities of creating their own systems of
exchange based more on the pursuit of socialGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_M Final Proof page 477 1.4.2009 3:19pmMONEY AND FINANCE