Finance and Society
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Monetary policy as economic warfare
Get PDFReview of Yannis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment, London, Bodley Head, 2017, 550 pp., £14.99 (pbk), ISBN 978-1-847-92446-
Modular sovereignty, security and debt: The Excessive Deficit Procedure of the European Union
Get PDFThe Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) is a political mechanism that aims at ‘multilevel governance’ of state indebtedness in the European Union. As such, it has become the concern of research that asks how sovereignty becomes articulated in this process. This article approaches this question through the conceptualization of a modular notion of sovereignty elaborated through a discussion of work on the finance-security nexus. The article argues that existing accounts of the formation of sovereign power in relation to state debt can be combined into a notion of modular sovereignty when seen through the prism of critiques of contractualism that take issue with liberal notions of state sovereignty and credit security. This way, the indebted state becomes visible as the referent object of multiple, and potentially contradictory, invocations of sovereignty as exercised in the EDP. First, it figures as the seat of budget sovereignty, holding its social substrate liable for its debts while ignoring inequalities in that substrate. Second, it is appealed to, within a biopolitical rationality, as the sovereign guarantor of the financial wellbeing of its population. Third, it is seen as the executor of financial wisdom that is mobilized in struggles between different levels of financial governance in the EDP
Capital Market Union and residential capitalism in Europe: Rescaling the housing-centred model of financialization
Get PDFThis article examines the effects of implementing the proposals of the European Commission to institute a Capital Market Union (CMU) on the diverse landscape of residential capitalism in Europe. The CMU will bypass existing national institutional blockades that left core countries of the Eurozone, namely Germany, France and Italy, largely untouched by the housing-centred model of financialization that developed in countries like Spain, Ireland, the UK and the Netherlands. It is widely acknowledged that the rise in securitized mortgage debt contributed to the global financial crisis. As part of the CMU, the new European Commission is promoting mortgage securitization throughout the EU and thereby rescaling the political economy of housing finance that was hitherto rooted in national, institutional models. We argue that countries which ‘missed’ the previous housing boom will not be able to prevent future housing-centred financialization. CMU thus signifies a spatial expansion of the debt-led accumulation model
Drowning the Greek economy: Injurious speech and sovereign debt
Get PDFDrawing on Judith Butler’s concept of injurious speech, this article conceptualises the ‘Grexit’ crisis as a series of performances. More specifically, we investigate how the Greek government framed the bailout plans tabled by the Troika as a form of torture. By adopting phrases such as ‘fiscal water-boarding’, ‘asphyxiation’, and ‘suicide’, the Syriza government sought to narrate the harm inflicted on Greece by its creditors. Paying attention to this language is important as it casts new light on how Greek sovereign debt has been framed, negotiated, and contested. In many ways, the overarching objective of this article is to tell a different story that takes discursive transitivity and restaging into account. By shifting the emphasis onto injurious speech, the article also brings the unintended effects of this language into focus. Despite the recurrent accusations made by Syriza as it attempted to resolve the Greek sovereign debt crisis, this article questions whether their bargaining strategy ‘misfired’. On closer consideration, we find that the injurious speech acts performed by the Syriza government compromised their ability to negotiate a third bailout deal in 2015. The observations remind us that words can wound in ambivalent ways
Finance/security/life
Get PDFWhat is the contemporary relation between finance and security? This essay encourages further research into the securitization of finance by developing the notion of ‘finance/security/life’. A focus on the intersections of finance/security/life will be shown to prompt a broadened range of critical, cross-disciplinary concerns with the various ways in which financial markets are positioned as vital to securing wealth, welfare and wellbeing
The anthropology of financial intent
Get PDFMuch has been learned about calculation, commodification and marketization from the social studies of markets and finance. But what of capitalization? What is distinctive about this mode of valuation and the reality it impels? What does it mean to live under the ‘asset condition’? In Capitalization: A Cultural Guide, Fabian Muniesa and his colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation take us on a tour across multiple continents and several centuries, introducing us to capitalization as a ‘cultural syndrome’. Their pragmatist enquiry involves tracing capitalization via the scenarios in which value is created, and the gaze that stimulates such value-creation. The result is a field guide to the terrain of capitalization that integrates anthropological work on the dramaturgy of finance with sociological attention to the technicalities of valuation. The stage is set for further investigation into the uneven distribution of the capacity to capitalize and its consequences
Foreword
Get PDFAt a time when the UK is making crucial choices about the future of universities and the costs which are borne by students, it is essential that the debate about what higher education is for and how it should be funded reaches beyond party politics. We need to hear the insights of students and business, of parents and universities. We need to consider what is being paid, by whom and on what terms. The future of the UK's productivity, of our great universities and of young people themselves demands that we think hard about what is right
Right to buy: A proposal to end the student loans crisis
Get PDFThe UK student loans system is in crisis and the government plans to sell off student loans to corporate purchasers. Such loan sales disadvantage government, the taxpayer and student borrowers. The government should give student borrowers the ‘right to buy’ their own loans for the same price the government is prepared to sell those loans to corporate purchasers. If borrowers purchased their own loans, disadvantages of loan sales would transform into advantages. The ‘right to buy’ can fairly be extended to all borrowers, regardless of whether their loans are being sold; this is done by extending the ‘right to buy’ as a ‘right to reduce’ student loans. The ‘right to reduce’ also provides a solution to the problem of how to ‘deal with’ existing student debt. Because the ‘right to buy’ and the ‘right to reduce’ both follow government’s pricing for loan sales, they should be universally acceptable; moreover, government, taxpayers and borrowers would be better off
Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation
Get PDFA new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents
Diagrams and algorithms
Get PDFPaolo Cirio is a conceptual artist who works with legal, economic and semiotic systems of the information society. He investigates social fields impacted by the Internet, such as privacy, copyright, politics and finance. He shows his research and intervention-based works through artifacts, photos, installations, videos, and public art. Cirio has exhibited in international museums and institutions and has won a number of awards, including Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, Transmediale Prize and the Eyebeam fellowship, among others. Visit his website at https://paolocirio.net