Payment systems and global financial order.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 309
Description: The central research goal of this dissertation is to develop an explanation for the fact that, despite the globalization of finance, no mechanism, institution, or procedure---no international lender of last resort---has emerged at the system level to deal with the repeated shortages of liquidity that threaten international financial stability.In each case study, various financial authorities and interests participated in shaping, influencing, and propelling domestic payment system developments. The thesis describes the processes by which public and private interests in the leading countries cooperated and interacted to reform and redesign their payment systems and their cross-border interlinkages as intermestic, and develops this concept to explain why no lender of last resort has emerged at the system level. In sum, the intermestic processes that produced payment system reform demonstrate how competitive impulses can work to produce a more stable international financial system.Processes of cooperation and collaboration between both public and private financial interests, processes working within and across borders, worked to redesign and reconstruct the plumbing of the financial system during this period in order to accommodate financial globalization. The dissertation contends that by doing so, these interests worked together to deliberately stifle both the need and call for an international lender of last resort. By reinforcing the mechanisms of financial circulation, the leading states in the system have preserved and ensured their capacity to intercede in international financial affairs. Private interests have supported this effort.The dissertation shifts the analytic focus away from the much-discussed international financial architecture, down onto the mechanisms that provide the essential plumbing of the international economy, the interbank payment systems of the leading countries. Using a comparative case study approach, the dissertation process-traces the development of the payment systems in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan in order to examine the interaction and cooperation between public and private financial interests within and between the cases starting in the early 1970s, the initial years of financial liberalization and capital market expansion, through to 2004, with a particular focus on the developments of the past two decades.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-10, Section: A, page: 3800.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

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