Making finance productive

Western governments' response to ongoing economic crisis has demonstrated that the financial services sector is seen to perform a critical and productive function in today's capitalist economies. This paper explores how this politically potent perception of productiveness has come to achieve the hegemony that it now enjoys. A principal forum for the 'making' of finance sector productiveness, it shows, has been the tradition of national accounting and its reporting of key economic metrics such as gross domestic product. By placing different activities on different sides of a pivotal 'production boundary', national income statisticians effectively dictate what counts as productive - as adding value to the economy - and what does not. Finance's contemporary representation as productive is predicated, the paper shows, on a long and contested history of boundary negotiation.