Barnes TJ

Brenner R

Cassidy J

Goldman M

Harvey D

Henderson G

Leyshon A

MacKenzie D

Marx K

Mitchell T

Suzuki T

Walker R

Leyshon, Andrew

Name not available

Commentary 2: The devil is in the detail – lies, damned lies and accounting for the value of banking [part of Book review symposium: Locating banks, tracking money]

Jane Pollard

Andrew Leyshon

George Henderson

Brett Christophers

Crossref

Progress in Human Geography

Book review symposium: Locating banks, tracking money: Banking across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (2013)

Nottingham eTheses

Leyshon, Andrew (2014) Commentary 2: The devil is in the detail – lies, damned lies and accounting for the value of banking [part of Book review symposium: Locating banks, tracking money]. Progress in Human Geography, 38 (2). pp. 319-329. ISSN 0309-1325 Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29021/2/Leyshon_2014_The%20devil%20is%20in%20the%20detail_PIHG.pdfCopyright and reuse: The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions.This article is made available under the University of Nottingham End User licence and may be reused according to the conditions of the licence.  For more details see: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdfA note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk1The devil is in the detail: lies, damned lies and accounting for the value of bankingChristophers, Brett. 2013. Banking Across Boundaries: placing finance in capitalism. London: Wiley-BlackwellIn the normal course of events I imagine that there are few points of contact between thesocial orbits of scholars of national accounting and investment bankers. However, as this excellentbook by Brett Christophers makes clear, bankers should be hosting regular events in honour of thenational accountancy community in gratitude for the unglamorous and painstaking work required toformulate measures such as GDP, GNP, and GVA, and in particular for the way in which banking isnow recorded in such statistics. In 2010, some 18 months after the breaking of the global financialcrisis, Andrew Haldene, the Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, drewattention to a statistical curiosity that suggested that even as the crisis unfolded in 2008 the officialstatistics seemed to suggest that British banks were achieving levels of productiveness not seensince the 1980s. Given the scale of the damage caused in the UK by the collapse of the bankingsector, which included a double-dip recession, and the fact that the industry is reliant on a taxpayersubsidy estimated to be somewhere between £30 billion and £120 billion (MacKenzie, 2013), theclaim that the industry was making a contribution to the national economy might appear seem to bea little fanciful. It certainly seemed so to Haldene and, in turn, to Christophers, and as such it servedas the catalyst for this innovative excursion into the looking glass world of banking and value. Thebook seeks to explain how an industry in crisis and which had caused such significant collateraldamage to the wider economy could, in the official statistics at least, be considered not only to beproductive but at the very moment of crisis, to be exceptionally so.Given the books motivation, it is not surprising that this is in many ways an academicdetective story as Christophers sets off to solve the mystery of how banking killed the economy but,despite all the circumstantial evidence, ended up being exonerated by the official data. Indeed,Christophers displays many of the skills required of a good detective, being both forensic in hisapproach and resolute in his persistence: his refusal to let claims go unchallenged or dataunexamined is an admirable feature throughout.To solve the productivity puzzle, Christophers explores the history of national statistics, inwhich the banking problem  how to adequately account for the economic role of banking withinan economy  looms large. Arriving at the overlooked field of critical accounting and, in particular,its focus on national accounting statistics and the conceptual struggles over the work that bankingdoes within an economy, Christophers argues that until relatively recently, banking was not affordedmuch value in such data. Although its role in providing circulation and intermediation was2recognised, banking was seen more as a necessary service for the rest of the economy than an actualcontribution it itself. Here national statisticians cleaved to traditional views of the role of money andbanking, which can be traced back to antiquity, through and up to physiocratic and politicaleconomy understandings of the role of money and finance in the creation of economic value. Thisremained the case for some considerable time, and it has been only recently that banking crossedthe boundary from the unproductive to the productive in such statistics. That it managed to do sowas in part a result of the second element of boundary-crossing that Christophers attends to  theinternationalisation of banking and, in particular, the arguments made to include banking in thetrade discussion from the 1970s onwards that opened up national economies to (mainly US) banks.As the book reveals, it was during this time that the phrase financial services itself first emerged,designed to more easily translate what were considered circulation functions into internationaltrade negotiation packages that dealt with services more generally. Thus, it was not until the early1990s that banking finally entered the world of the productive within the official statistics, with thevalue of banking institutions being attributed to their disproportionate ability to assume risk bysetting interest rates that differed from a nominal background average. The more banks could offerrates that diverged from the norm  which effectively represented their appetite for risk  the morevalue banks added to the economy. This is a significant and important observation, because asbanks productivity became based on their ability to bear risk and to manage it, so it became anincentive for banks to take on riskier assets  that is, charging higher than average interest rates tohigher risk borrowers  and to use the additional profits derived from such assets to support higherthan average interest rates on their liabilities. Thus, whereas the financialization literature to datehas  rightly in my view  attributed the decline in global interest rates from the mid-1990s onwardsas a major factor in the accumulation of riskier assets, as banks sought ways of beating the norm tomeet performance targets, Christophers reveals that the official statistics also contained within thema feedback mechanism that in effect gave official sanction and encouragement for what they weredoing. As banks absorbed more risk, with all that implies, the better they were seen to beperforming.This argument alone deserves a much wider audience, and provides further evidence of howimportant academic work is to the performance and management of the economy. The debunkingof Reinhart and Rogoffs recent analysis of the relationship between high levels of national debt andlow levels of economic growth which, in the words of John Cassidy (2013), has been seized upon byconservative politicians around the world  to justify penny-pinching policies, is a particularly goodexample of this. However, Reinhart and Rogoffs errors were reasonably transparent, in that theywere uncovered by a graduate student who spotted simple omissions in an excel file that the3authors provided in good spirit in order to be helpful. However, as Christophers painstakinglydemonstrates, it takes rather more work to find the hidden sources of banking productivity in thenational accounting literature and, partly for the same reason, it will also take more effort to bringthe skew towards risk to the attention to a wider audience, although that does not mean that itshould not or could not be done. The book is yet another example of the explanatory powerpossible from detailed social and historical analyses of economic ideas and practices inspired by thelikes of Callon, MacKenzie and others.It should be clear by now that I think this book is a major contribution. However, that is notto day that I do not have the odd quibble. Christophers seems very reluctant to engage with theissue of capital mobility. This is partly a result of a strategy to sharpen the analytical lens, and is insome ways in understandable, as to cover this issue in at the same level as he does banking wouldmake the book considerably longer than it is and perhaps undermine the power of the bankingproblem. However, the geographical mobility of money and investment is surely critical to anunderstanding of banking and financial services as it is the source of much of its power through itsfungibility and leverage through financial markets such as foreign exchange and various kinds ofsecurities. On several occasions in the argument begins to move towards the issue of capitalmobility but is then abruptly reined in by the author on grounds of remit and scope. One can onlyhope that this critically important issue of boundary crossing is dealt with in subsequentpublications. It is rather difficult to place banking in capitalism without a consideration of thismatter. Finally, I also have to take issue with the authors framing of my book with Nigel Thrift,Money/Space (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997), which he accuses of being dismissive of a materialapproach in favour of a discursive one, and that we depicted matters in either/or terms (BankingAcross Boundaries, page 12). Christophers upbraids us for this, arguing that what we need to do iscritically to analyze the material motions of capital and  to understand the work of ideas inframing and constituting the capitalistic environment (ibid., original emphasis). Christophers claimsabout our pro-discursive anti-materialist position seems to derive from the penultimate page of thepreface toMoney/Space in which we state that we have thrown away many of the Marxian tracesto move towards a more discursive approach. I would stress the word many; that does not mean all.Later, on the same page, we argue that, We have become suspicious of accounts that try to make aclear distinction between the economic sphere (to which money is often confined) and otherspheres (onto which the economic sphere is too often unproblematically mapped), on the groundsthat such a distinction itself often presumes cultural norms which may indeed be constitutive but byno means need to be regarded as inevitable (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997, page xv). This seems to bemuch more in accordance with what Christophers argues throughout this book, and I think more4connects the two works than divides them. However, both these points are relatively minor andshould not detract from what is clear a major contribution to the field.ReferencesCassidy, J., 2013. The Reinhart and Rogoff controversy: a summing up. The New Yorker [Online], 29thApril. Available from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/04/the-rogoff-and-reinhart-controversy-a-summing-up.html#entry-more [Accessed 4 May, 2013].Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N., 1997.Money/Space: geographies of monetary transformation. London:RoutledgeMacKenzie, D., 2013. The Magic Lever. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 35 no. 9 pp. 16-19.Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n09/donald-mackenzie/the-magic-lever [Accessed 4May 2013].Andrew Leyshon, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RDJune 2013

Repository@Nottingham

1The devil is in the detail: lies, damned lies and accounting for the value of bankingChristophers, Brett. 2013. Banking Across Boundaries: placing finance in capitalism. London: Wiley-BlackwellIn the normal course of events I imagine that there are few points of contact between thesocial orbits of scholars of national accounting and investment bankers. However, as this excellentbook by Brett Christophers makes clear, bankers should be hosting regular events in honour of thenational accountancy community in gratitude for the unglamorous and painstaking work required toformulate measures such as GDP, GNP, and GVA, and in particular for the way in which banking isnow recorded in such statistics. In 2010, some 18 months after the breaking of the global financialcrisis, Andrew Haldene, the Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, drewattention to a statistical curiosity that suggested that even as the crisis unfolded in 2008 the officialstatistics seemed to suggest that British banks were achieving levels of productiveness not seensince the 1980s. Given the scale of the damage caused in the UK by the collapse of the bankingsector, which included a double-dip recession, and the fact that the industry is reliant on a taxpayersubsidy estimated to be somewhere between £30 billion and £120 billion (MacKenzie, 2013), theclaim that the industry was making a contribution to the national economy might appear seem to bea little fanciful. It certainly seemed so to Haldene and, in turn, to Christophers, and as such it servedas the catalyst for this innovative excursion into the looking glass world of banking and value. Thebook seeks to explain how an industry in crisis and which had caused such significant collateraldamage to the wider economy could, in the official statistics at least, be considered not only to beproductive but at the very moment of crisis, to be exceptionally so.Given the book’s motivation, it is not surprising that this is in many ways an academicdetective story as Christophers sets off to solve the mystery of how banking killed the economy but,despite all the circumstantial evidence, ended up being exonerated by the official data. Indeed,Christophers displays many of the skills required of a good detective, being both forensic in hisapproach and resolute in his persistence: his refusal to let claims go unchallenged or dataunexamined is an admirable feature throughout.To solve the productivity puzzle, Christophers explores the history of national statistics, inwhich the ‘banking problem’ – how to adequately account for the economic role of banking withinan economy – looms large. Arriving at the overlooked field of critical accounting and, in particular,its focus on national accounting statistics and the conceptual struggles over the work that bankingdoes within an economy, Christophers argues that until relatively recently, banking was not affordedmuch value in such data. Although its role in providing circulation and intermediation was2recognised, banking was seen more as a necessary service for the rest of the economy than an actualcontribution it itself. Here national statisticians cleaved to traditional views of the role of money andbanking, which can be traced back to antiquity, through and up to physiocratic and politicaleconomy understandings of the role of money and finance in the creation of economic value. Thisremained the case for some considerable time, and it has been only recently that banking crossedthe boundary from the unproductive to the productive in such statistics. That it managed to do sowas in part a result of the second element of boundary-crossing that Christophers attends to – theinternationalisation of banking and, in particular, the arguments made to include banking in thetrade discussion from the 1970s onwards that opened up national economies to (mainly US) banks.As the book reveals, it was during this time that the phrase ‘financial services’ itself first emerged,designed to more easily translate what were considered circulation functions into internationaltrade negotiation packages that dealt with services more generally. Thus, it was not until the early1990s that banking finally entered the world of the productive within the official statistics, with thevalue of banking institutions being attributed to their disproportionate ability to assume risk bysetting interest rates that differed from a nominal background average. The more banks could offerrates that diverged from the norm – which effectively represented their appetite for risk – the morevalue banks added to the economy. This is a significant and important observation, because asbanks productivity became based on their ability to bear risk and to manage it, so it became anincentive for banks to take on riskier assets – that is, charging higher than average interest rates tohigher risk borrowers – and to use the additional profits derived from such assets to support higherthan average interest rates on their liabilities. Thus, whereas the financialization literature to datehas – rightly in my view – attributed the decline in global interest rates from the mid-1990s onwardsas a major factor in the accumulation of riskier assets, as banks sought ways of beating the norm tomeet performance targets, Christophers reveals that the official statistics also contained within thema feedback mechanism that in effect gave official sanction and encouragement for what they weredoing. As banks absorbed more risk, with all that implies, the better they were seen to beperforming.This argument alone deserves a much wider audience, and provides further evidence of howimportant academic work is to the performance and management of the economy. The debunkingof Reinhart and Rogoff’s recent analysis of the relationship between high levels of national debt andlow levels of economic growth which, in the words of John Cassidy (2013), has been seized upon by’conservative politicians around the world … to justify penny-pinching policies’, is a particularly goodexample of this. However, Reinhart and Rogoff’s errors were reasonably transparent, in that theywere uncovered by a graduate student who spotted simple omissions in an excel file that the3authors provided in good spirit in order to be helpful. However, as Christophers painstakinglydemonstrates, it takes rather more work to find the hidden sources of banking productivity in thenational accounting literature and, partly for the same reason, it will also take more effort to bringthe skew towards risk to the attention to a wider audience, although that does not mean that itshould not or could not be done. The book is yet another example of the explanatory powerpossible from detailed social and historical analyses of economic ideas and practices inspired by thelikes of Callon, MacKenzie and others.It should be clear by now that I think this book is a major contribution. However, that is notto day that I do not have the odd quibble. Christophers seems very reluctant to engage with theissue of capital mobility. This is partly a result of a strategy to sharpen the analytical lens, and is insome ways in understandable, as to cover this issue in at the same level as he does banking wouldmake the book considerably longer than it is and perhaps undermine the power of the bankingproblem. However, the geographical mobility of money and investment is surely critical to anunderstanding of banking and financial services as it is the source of much of its power through itsfungibility and leverage through financial markets such as foreign exchange and various kinds ofsecurities. On several occasions in the argument begins to move towards the issue of capitalmobility but is then abruptly reined in by the author on grounds of remit and scope. One can onlyhope that this critically important issue of boundary crossing is dealt with in subsequentpublications. It is rather difficult to ‘place banking in capitalism’ without a consideration of thismatter. Finally, I also have to take issue with the author’s framing of my book with Nigel Thrift,Money/Space (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997), which he accuses of being dismissive of a materialapproach in favour of a discursive one, and that we ‘depicted matters in either/or terms’ (BankingAcross Boundaries, page 12). Christophers upbraids us for this, arguing that what we need to do is‘critically to analyze the material motions of capital and … to understand the work of ideas inframing and constituting the capitalistic environment’ (ibid., original emphasis). Christophers’ claimsabout our pro-discursive anti-materialist position seems to derive from the penultimate page of thepreface to Money/Space in which we state that ‘we have thrown away many of the Marxian traces’to move towards a more discursive approach. I would stress the word many; that does not mean all.Later, on the same page, we argue that, ‘We have become suspicious of accounts that try to make aclear distinction between the economic sphere (to which money is often confined) and otherspheres (onto which the economic sphere is too often unproblematically mapped), on the groundsthat such a distinction itself often presumes cultural norms which may indeed be constitutive but byno means need to be regarded as inevitable’ (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997, page xv). This seems to bemuch more in accordance with what Christophers argues throughout this book, and I think more4connects the two works than divides them. However, both these points are relatively minor andshould not detract from what is clear a major contribution to the field.ReferencesCassidy, J., 2013. The Reinhart and Rogoff controversy: a summing up. The New Yorker [Online], 29thApril. Available from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/04/the-rogoff-and-reinhart-controversy-a-summing-up.html#entry-more [Accessed 4 May, 2013].Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N., 1997. Money/Space: geographies of monetary transformation. London:RoutledgeMacKenzie, D., 2013. The Magic Lever. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 35 no. 9 pp. 16-19.Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n09/donald-mackenzie/the-magic-lever [Accessed 4May 2013].Andrew Leyshon, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RDJune 2013

Nottingham ePrints

Leyshon, Andrew (2014) Commentary 2: The devil is in the detail – lies, damned lies and accounting for the value of banking [part of Book review symposium: Locating banks, tracking money]. Progress in Human Geography, 38 (2). pp. 319-329. ISSN 0309-1325 Access from the University of Nottingham repository: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29021/2/Leyshon_2014_The%20devil%20is%20in%20the%20detail_PIHG.pdfCopyright and reuse: The Nottingham ePrints service makes this work by researchers of the University of Nottingham available open access under the following conditions.· Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners.· To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in Nottingham ePrints has been checked for eligibility before being made available.· Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.· Quotations or similar reproductions must be sufficiently acknowledged.Please see our full end user licence at: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf A note on versions: The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher’s version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription.For more information, please contact eprints@nottingham.ac.uk1The devil is in the detail: lies, damned lies and accounting for the value of bankingChristophers, Brett. 2013. Banking Across Boundaries: placing finance in capitalism. London: Wiley-BlackwellIn the normal course of events I imagine that there are few points of contact between thesocial orbits of scholars of national accounting and investment bankers. However, as this excellentbook by Brett Christophers makes clear, bankers should be hosting regular events in honour of thenational accountancy community in gratitude for the unglamorous and painstaking work required toformulate measures such as GDP, GNP, and GVA, and in particular for the way in which banking isnow recorded in such statistics. In 2010, some 18 months after the breaking of the global financialcrisis, Andrew Haldene, the Executive Director for Financial Stability at the Bank of England, drewattention to a statistical curiosity that suggested that even as the crisis unfolded in 2008 the officialstatistics seemed to suggest that British banks were achieving levels of productiveness not seensince the 1980s. Given the scale of the damage caused in the UK by the collapse of the bankingsector, which included a double-dip recession, and the fact that the industry is reliant on a taxpayersubsidy estimated to be somewhere between £30 billion and £120 billion (MacKenzie, 2013), theclaim that the industry was making a contribution to the national economy might appear seem to bea little fanciful. It certainly seemed so to Haldene and, in turn, to Christophers, and as such it servedas the catalyst for this innovative excursion into the looking glass world of banking and value. Thebook seeks to explain how an industry in crisis and which had caused such significant collateraldamage to the wider economy could, in the official statistics at least, be considered not only to beproductive but at the very moment of crisis, to be exceptionally so.Given the books motivation, it is not surprising that this is in many ways an academicdetective story as Christophers sets off to solve the mystery of how banking killed the economy but,despite all the circumstantial evidence, ended up being exonerated by the official data. Indeed,Christophers displays many of the skills required of a good detective, being both forensic in hisapproach and resolute in his persistence: his refusal to let claims go unchallenged or dataunexamined is an admirable feature throughout.To solve the productivity puzzle, Christophers explores the history of national statistics, inwhich the banking problem  how to adequately account for the economic role of banking withinan economy  looms large. Arriving at the overlooked field of critical accounting and, in particular,its focus on national accounting statistics and the conceptual struggles over the work that bankingdoes within an economy, Christophers argues that until relatively recently, banking was not affordedmuch value in such data. Although its role in providing circulation and intermediation was2recognised, banking was seen more as a necessary service for the rest of the economy than an actualcontribution it itself. Here national statisticians cleaved to traditional views of the role of money andbanking, which can be traced back to antiquity, through and up to physiocratic and politicaleconomy understandings of the role of money and finance in the creation of economic value. Thisremained the case for some considerable time, and it has been only recently that banking crossedthe boundary from the unproductive to the productive in such statistics. That it managed to do sowas in part a result of the second element of boundary-crossing that Christophers attends to  theinternationalisation of banking and, in particular, the arguments made to include banking in thetrade discussion from the 1970s onwards that opened up national economies to (mainly US) banks.As the book reveals, it was during this time that the phrase financial services itself first emerged,designed to more easily translate what were considered circulation functions into internationaltrade negotiation packages that dealt with services more generally. Thus, it was not until the early1990s that banking finally entered the world of the productive within the official statistics, with thevalue of banking institutions being attributed to their disproportionate ability to assume risk bysetting interest rates that differed from a nominal background average. The more banks could offerrates that diverged from the norm  which effectively represented their appetite for risk  the morevalue banks added to the economy. This is a significant and important observation, because asbanks productivity became based on their ability to bear risk and to manage it, so it became anincentive for banks to take on riskier assets  that is, charging higher than average interest rates tohigher risk borrowers  and to use the additional profits derived from such assets to support higherthan average interest rates on their liabilities. Thus, whereas the financialization literature to datehas  rightly in my view  attributed the decline in global interest rates from the mid-1990s onwardsas a major factor in the accumulation of riskier assets, as banks sought ways of beating the norm tomeet performance targets, Christophers reveals that the official statistics also contained within thema feedback mechanism that in effect gave official sanction and encouragement for what they weredoing. As banks absorbed more risk, with all that implies, the better they were seen to beperforming.This argument alone deserves a much wider audience, and provides further evidence of howimportant academic work is to the performance and management of the economy. The debunkingof Reinhart and Rogoffs recent analysis of the relationship between high levels of national debt andlow levels of economic growth which, in the words of John Cassidy (2013), has been seized upon byconservative politicians around the world  to justify penny-pinching policies, is a particularly goodexample of this. However, Reinhart and Rogoffs errors were reasonably transparent, in that theywere uncovered by a graduate student who spotted simple omissions in an excel file that the3authors provided in good spirit in order to be helpful. However, as Christophers painstakinglydemonstrates, it takes rather more work to find the hidden sources of banking productivity in thenational accounting literature and, partly for the same reason, it will also take more effort to bringthe skew towards risk to the attention to a wider audience, although that does not mean that itshould not or could not be done. The book is yet another example of the explanatory powerpossible from detailed social and historical analyses of economic ideas and practices inspired by thelikes of Callon, MacKenzie and others.It should be clear by now that I think this book is a major contribution. However, that is notto day that I do not have the odd quibble. Christophers seems very reluctant to engage with theissue of capital mobility. This is partly a result of a strategy to sharpen the analytical lens, and is insome ways in understandable, as to cover this issue in at the same level as he does banking wouldmake the book considerably longer than it is and perhaps undermine the power of the bankingproblem. However, the geographical mobility of money and investment is surely critical to anunderstanding of banking and financial services as it is the source of much of its power through itsfungibility and leverage through financial markets such as foreign exchange and various kinds ofsecurities. On several occasions in the argument begins to move towards the issue of capitalmobility but is then abruptly reined in by the author on grounds of remit and scope. One can onlyhope that this critically important issue of boundary crossing is dealt with in subsequentpublications. It is rather difficult to place banking in capitalism without a consideration of thismatter. Finally, I also have to take issue with the authors framing of my book with Nigel Thrift,Money/Space (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997), which he accuses of being dismissive of a materialapproach in favour of a discursive one, and that we depicted matters in either/or terms (BankingAcross Boundaries, page 12). Christophers upbraids us for this, arguing that what we need to do iscritically to analyze the material motions of capital and  to understand the work of ideas inframing and constituting the capitalistic environment (ibid., original emphasis). Christophers claimsabout our pro-discursive anti-materialist position seems to derive from the penultimate page of thepreface toMoney/Space in which we state that we have thrown away many of the Marxian tracesto move towards a more discursive approach. I would stress the word many; that does not mean all.Later, on the same page, we argue that, We have become suspicious of accounts that try to make aclear distinction between the economic sphere (to which money is often confined) and otherspheres (onto which the economic sphere is too often unproblematically mapped), on the groundsthat such a distinction itself often presumes cultural norms which may indeed be constitutive but byno means need to be regarded as inevitable (Leyshon and Thrift, 1997, page xv). This seems to bemuch more in accordance with what Christophers argues throughout this book, and I think more4connects the two works than divides them. However, both these points are relatively minor andshould not detract from what is clear a major contribution to the field.ReferencesCassidy, J., 2013. The Reinhart and Rogoff controversy: a summing up. The New Yorker [Online], 29thApril. Available from http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/04/the-rogoff-and-reinhart-controversy-a-summing-up.html#entry-more [Accessed 4 May, 2013].Leyshon, A. and Thrift, N., 1997.Money/Space: geographies of monetary transformation. London:RoutledgeMacKenzie, D., 2013. The Magic Lever. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 35 no. 9 pp. 16-19.Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n09/donald-mackenzie/the-magic-lever [Accessed 4May 2013].Andrew Leyshon, School of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RDJune 2013

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