Locating Global Value: National Statistical Infrastructures and Multinational Banks

In this article, we argue that attention to the infrastructural work of statistics can help to specify the spaces of capital flows. Global finance is often characterized as a realm that supersedes the nation-state. In contrast, we show that financial statistics produce specific geographies that are both national and gobalized.
Statistical infrastructures facilitate the circulation of capital that, with the rise of financialization, has become increasingly central to daily life. The BIS is one of the world’s premier financial monitoring institutions, and nations are integral to their efforts to classify multinational banks. This article analyzes two sets of distinctions in BIS banking statistics: first, the distinction between bank nationality and residency, and second, that between domestic, international, local, foreign and/or cross-border claims.
These distinctions change depending on who observes them(Esposito 2013; see also Stark 2013) and where they are reported. So, rather than a view from nowhere (Haraway 1988) or a deterritorialized space of flows (Castells 1998), BIS statistics rely upon a grounded view of capital as a substance that flows through discrete passages (P. Peters, Kloppenburg, and Wyatt 2010) or channels (Tsing 2000). The globalization that emerges can be viewed as a form of infrastructural globalism (Edwards 2006) that complexly performs the nation-state.