Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
globalisation of production also encourages the growth of what Dicken (1992) calls
‘circulation activities’ that ‘connect the various parts of the production system
together’ (p. 5). That is, an essential condition of the globalisation of production
has been the globalisation of information services such as advertising, banking, insurance
and consultancy services which provide ‘an emerging global infrastructure’
(Dicken, 1992, p. 5). For instance, American Express, Citicorp, BankAmerica,
Lloyds insurance and Merrill Lynch also straddle the globe, servicing the corporate
industrial outfits that they closely parallel in their structures and orientations.
Globalisation of finance
So a central aspect of globalisation is the spread of worldwide informational
services such as banks and insurance corporations. These suggest something of
the globalisation of finance, but this latter refers also to something more, nothing
less than the development of an increasingly integrated global financial market.
With sophisticated ICT systems now in place, plus the deregulation of stock
markets and the abolition of exchange controls, we have nowadays facilities for
the continuous and real-time flow of monetary information, for round-the-clock
trading in stocks, bonds and currencies. These developments have enormously
increased both the volume and velocity of international financial transactions,
bringing with them a heightened vulnerability of any national economy to the
money markets.
The scale and speed of these informational flows is astonishing. Over a
decade ago Will Hutton (1994) observed that foreign exchange turnover now
dwarfs the size of national economies and makes trade flows (a traditional
method of measuring national economic activity in terms of import and export
levels) appear small in comparison. Thus ‘[t]he total level of world merchandise
trade in 1993 is two-thirds of U.S. GDP; it will take turnover in the foreign
exchange markets less than a fortnight to reach the same total – leaving aside
the cross-border derivative, bond and equity markets’ (p. 13). Offering a historical
perspective, Joyce Kolko (1988) traces an exponential growth in foreign
exchange trading during the second half of the twentieth century. In 1993 Fortune
magazine (26 July) reported that flows through the US-based Clearing House
Interbank Payments System averaged $850 billion or more per day and sometimes
passed $1 trillion (p. 26). By 2000 this figure had risen to $1.5 trillion per
day, a sum scarcely comprehensible to most people.
Globalisation of communications
Another dimension of globalisation, again intimately connected to other features
of the same process, is the spread of communications networks that straddle the
globe. Clearly there is a technological dimension to this – satellite systems,
telecommunications facilities and the like – to which I shall return, but here I
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