Financial Professionals as a Global Elite

In the last 30 years, the issuance of stocks and bonds has become the main source of financing for companies not only in the United States and Europe, but also in India and in many other countries in the developing world. In addition, the issuance of sovereign bonds has become an unavoidable element of state budgets, as we know them today. The financial industry, responsible for attracting the funds and allocating them among these different aspirants to global credit, is thus at the center of a global distribution of resources. In this chapter, I will develop a notion of elite that attempts to grasp the specific relation of power in which the financial industry operates today. In particular, I will attempt to clarify how the professionals of the financial industry, responsible for a global distribution of resources that they effect through their everyday procedures, can be thought of as central to a political process.1 To do so, I will draw on the work of Marcel Mauss, in particular the way in which he attempted to understand financial flows as constitutive of specific social hierarchies in a geographical space that went beyond that of official political groups, and with a temporal horizon that, spanning generations, superseded the limits of each individual’s life. This will help to explore the specific place of the financial industry in a global social space in which it produces hierarchies in the access of credit.