The scale effects of financialization: The Fair Credit Reporting Act and the production of financial space and subjects

- Rescaling financial regulatory sovereignty facilitates expansion of consumer credit markets.
- Rescaling US financial markets shapes processes of financial subject formation.
- National credit reporting standards depend on consumer access to risk scoring products.
- Access to credit reports amplifies their function as apparatuses of financial government.

This paper excavates recent legislative efforts to construct a national space for the purchase and sale of consumer credit risk in the United States. During the mid-1990s and early 2000s the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA 1970) was amended several times in an effort to produce a national space in which consumer credit risk could be priced in “place-free” terms. This effort to produce a national consumer credit space provides insight into several extant and emerging issues in financial geography. First, the recent history of FCRA shows how the (re)production of financial relations at a national level can reshape financial relations at other scalar levels, and vice versa. Second, it reveals that processes of financial subject formation are more closely tied to the production and reproduction of geographical scale than has been previously demonstrated. Finally, I argue that the rescaling(s) that have attended the amendment of FCRA have reworked the relationship between individuals and their virtual financial selves (i.e. credit reports and scores) in ways that have created new tensions, contradictions and sites of struggle in the nascent post-crisis politics of financialization.