Giving shape to finance and the City of London: permissive regulation and minimalist governance

To walk through the close streets and narrow alleys of the City of London is to step into another world. A world ostensibly in London, but certainly not of London. This is a space defined by finance; it is a cathedral to the power of capital, competition and, above all, pure market ideology. Almost everything that operates within this space does so for the purposes of enshrining competitive market exchange. Yet, in the decades subsequent to the 2008 financial crisis, we have only seen how this market ideology often runs unchecked and is too often stalked by, what Susan Strange (1997) so emphatically referred to as, casino capitalism. For Strange (1997), the important distinction between the gambling of casinos and that of finance is, at least in the context of the former, there is a level of voluntary engagement. However, in the context of finance, and as the crisis of 2008 laid so bare, we are all woven into the tapestry of risk as involuntary participants, ensnared and unable to escape. Of less interest here is whether any specific crime was committed during this time. After all, as Tombs and Canning (2021) remind us, crime is little more than a state labelling process. Of more importance is the systemic harm the cascaded out of decades of permissive regulation, corporate greed and endemic cultures of risk and aggression with little concern for any social impact not reflected on the profit and loss sheet. The true legacy of the Great Financial Crisis is that it enshrined the truism that, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (2011) highlighted, it was the poorest and most vulnerable in our society who paid the highest price, whilst contributing the least to its origins and development. And so it continues, all aspects of finance punish those most marginalised across society (Baeckström 2022).