Designed to Fail

This chapter follows the notion of ‘financial stability’ within the post-crisis discourse. Thereby, the chapter addresses the changes in epistemology and discourse on financial regulation that followed the financial crisis. The crisis led to a reconsideration of pre-crisis regulation, and experts came to the conclusion that it failed to detect risks on a systemic level and they introduced security techniques of preparedness that are also applied in other fields. The articulation of the so-called macroprudential approach to regulation became most dominant in post-crisis regulatory discourse as it connected readily to the discourse’s central referent object and empty signifier – ‘financial stability’. The macroprudential approach was introduced in institutions of financial governance, and several high-level bodies were established that are responsible for this regulatory perspective. The macroprudential approach promotes the idea of ‘resilient’ financial markets that would be able to resist the next crisis. This entails the conviction that future financial crises cannot be prevented, but merely limited in their effects. The chapter discusses how measures to make financial markets ‘safer’ for political security collide with the methodologies of financial markets, especially in terms of their epistemological foundation and temporalities.