Essay on SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication)

Background
The ability to transfer funds electronically revolutionized global finance. The electronic revolution poses threats to state power because the private sector has more ability to influence monetary policy. Electronic abilities have also created worldwide networks with transactions occurring at high speed. However, the manner in which nation states incorporate and utilize technology will determine whether electronic ability increases or decreases state power over the financial sector.

Information technologies (IT) have been applied more extensively to the financial sector than to any other sector of the world economy. They first began to be used in a widespread manner during the 1970s and 1980s in order to increase the efficiency of processing, storing and transmitting money at the wholesale level by large financial institutions. More recently, they have also come to play a vital role in retail financial transactions. The profound influence of the application of IT to finance is apparent in the United States, for example, where payments in electronic form were estimated at U.S. $417 trillion in 1991, as compared with only U.S. $70 trillion for paper and check payments, and a mere U.S. $1.7 trillion for payments in currency and coin. Money, it appears, has come to be primarily an electronic blip on a computer screen or in a database.

The new "electronic" forms of money pose important challenges to state power and control. One such challenge derives from the unprecedented mobility of money in its new electronic form. Indeed, the IT revolution is usually seen as a key cause of the dramatic globalization of financial markets in recent years, a development that has raised new questions about states' ability to regulate the movement of money. In the last few years, information technologies have also begun to be used to create entirely new forms of money, sometimes referred to as stored value devices...................

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY