Transforming financial OTC Markets. Struggles around categories

We take advantage of the regulatory change planned to transform financial OTC markets into organized markets to study the processes and the means by which powerful actors resist categorization and contest a certain vision of the market. Specifically analyzing the documents produced by the MiFID 2 consultation, we show how, by undermining the categories proposed by the regulator, major dealers attempt to create incommensurability. We study the way they simultaneously attempt to protect the “clubby” nature of OTC markets, evidencing that the struggle against the regulation to come is a struggle over a market form. We unveil the way by which major dealers are eventually cornered by regulators to develop the notion of a specific nature of OTC markets, lacking however a conceptualization to strengthen their argument.