Financialisation of Singaporean Banks and the Production of Variegated Financial Capitalism

Abstract

This chapter addresses the lacuna of research on the state within the financialization literature by focusing on state-firm relations to explain capitalist processes and formations. Set in the context of Singapore’s banking restructuring in the late-1990s and early-2000s, we argue that what might appear to be a convergence in the governance and organizational structures of local banks actually stems from strikingly different relationships with the state, resulting in distinctive pathways to financialization. This departs from the traditional financial ‘liberalization’ narrative and reveals the uneven, contested and multi-scalar dynamics of capitalist processes. Rather than using Singapore’s case as yet another variety in a portfolio of capitalisms, we argue that the transformation of local banks into financial services corporations through state-firms relations is emblematic of financialized modes of production in what we call variegated financial capitalism.

Keywords: Banking, financialization, varieties of capitalism, variegated capitalism, Singapore