Central Banking, Shadow Banking, and Infrastructural Power 1

The global expansion of the financial sector has transformed capitalism, with significant consequences for the distribution of income, wealth, and power. While the earlier financialization literature often focused on the behavior of shareholders and corporate management, political economists have increasingly zeroed in on dynamics taking place at the core of the financial system, namely the rise of shadow banking, and of market-based finance more generally (Godechot 2016; Maxfield, Winecoff and Young 2017; Thiemann 2018). The new frontier for this research agenda, we argue, is the question of how power operates at the hybrid, public–private core of the monetary system, where banks transact with the central bank (Braun 2018b).