This compelling contribution to contemporary debates about the banking industry offers a unique perspective on its geographical and conceptual 'placement'. It traces the evolving links between the two, revealing how our notions of banking 'productiveness' have evolved alongside the shifting loci of banking activity.

• An original contribution to the urgent debates taking place on banking sparked by the current economic crisis
• Offers a unique perspective on the geographical and social concept of 'placement' of the banking industry
• Combines theoretical approaches from political economy with contemporary literature on the performativity of economics
• Details the globalization of Western banking, and analyzes how representations of the banking sector's productiveness have shifted throughout the evolution of Western economic theory
• Analyzes the social conceptualization of the nature – and value – of the banking industry
• Illuminates not only how economic ideas 'perform' and shape the economic world, but how those ideas are themselves always products of particular economic realities

Brett Christophers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Economic Geography and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He holds degrees from the Universities of Oxford, UK, British Columbia, Canada, and Auckland, New Zealand, and is the author of Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (1998) and Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (2009).