Relational state-market hybridity : the yield curve and coordination of monetary futures

Abstract

Contemporary monetary governance under financialization is increasingly organized through hybrid arrangements in which central banks and financial markets are (infra)structurally interdependent. Drawing on more than 50 interviews with market participants and central bank officials, this paper examines how this hybridity is enacted and sustained through the yield curve, a hybrid monetary device embedded in material semiotic arrangements that link policy and markets through recursive processes of interpretation and action. The paper conceptualizes hybridity as a relational process, showing how monetary authority is performed through coordination, while challenging linear models of expectation governance that assume automatic transmission or successful performativity. By bringing political economy, economic sociology and social studies of finance into dialogue, the paper offers an account of how the contemporary state-market hybridity of money is produced through the relational coordination of monetary futures between central banks and financial markets via the yield curve as a hybrid device.