At the core of the 2008 financial crisis was a massive, un-publicly regulated market of complex financial products, which transmitted losses in the US residential mortgage market throughout the global financial system. How did the market for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives grow so large and so risky with so little public supervision and regulation? At the heart of the matter, I contend, are changes in how both derivatives and risk have been understood as objects of governance. This article focuses on the decade preceding the passage of the 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act to demonstrate how competing and ultimately shifting understandings of both derivatives and financial risk put in place the conditions of possibility for the definitive deregulation of this market. Through a detailed interpretive analysis of regulatory documents, I show that changes in OTC derivatives regulation have been driven by changes in how regulators interpret derivatives themselves in a context of changing beliefs about risk and its management. Although regulators were acutely aware of OTC derivatives’ contribution to systemic risk as early as the early 1990s, they ultimately concluded that derivatives’ ability to serve as tools of risk management and generators of financial profits was consistent with their goal of promoting deep and liquid financial markets and thus took a decisively hands-off approach to regulation. The article concludes with a discussion of what shifts in interpretation and regulation of derivatives can tell us about the limits and potential for lasting post-crisis changes in financial governance.

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从炸弹到福音：危机前场外衍生品市场风险和监管观念的变化

2008 年金融危机的核心是一个庞大的、不受公开监管的复杂金融产品市场，它将美国住宅抵押贷款市场的损失传递到全球金融体系。场外交易 (OTC) 衍生品市场如何在公众监督和监管如此之少的情况下发展得如此庞大且风险如此之大？我认为，问题的核心是衍生品和风险被理解为治理对象的方式发生了变化。本文重点关注 2000 年《商品期货现代化法案》通过前的十年，以展示对衍生品和金融风险的竞争和最终转变的理解如何为最终解除该市场管制的可能性创造条件。通过对监管文件的详细解读分析，我表明，场外衍生品监管的变化是由监管机构在对风险及其管理的信念不断变化的背景下如何解释衍生品本身的变化所驱动的。尽管监管机构早在 1990 年代初期就敏锐地意识到场外衍生品对系统性风险的贡献，但他们最终得出结论，衍生品作为风险管理工具和金融利润产生器的能力与其促进深度和流动性金融的目标一致。市场，因此对监管采取了果断的放手态度。文章最后讨论了衍生品的解释和监管的哪些变化可以告诉我们金融治理的持续危机后变化的局限性和潜力。