Finance and Society
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Who owes? Class struggle, inequality and the political economy of leverage in the twenty-first century
Get PDFThe prevalent consensus in critical social sciences is that finance articulates the world economy as a global hierarchy of creditor-debtor relations that reproduce and further aggravate existing income and wealth inequalities. Class struggle is correspondingly understood as a conflict between elite creditors, who are members of the global top 1% of wealth holders, and mass debtors, who are burdened by growing costs of servicing public and private debts. This article offers an alternative understanding of how debt, inequality and class relate to one another. At its basis is the recognition that over the past four decades, finance has empowered upper class borrowers, including the top 1%, as it has magnified their capacity to generate capital gains and capture greater wealth and income shares via levered-up investments and other forms of positioning in financial and property markets. The article thus provides a political economy of leverage as power, showing how contemporary global finance has not given shape to a distributional conflict between creditors and debtors as two distinct classes, but instead has set debtors against debtors, and namely the greater borrowers against the lesser ones
Everything you always wanted to know about credit ratings (but were afraid to ask)
Get PDFGiulia Mennillo’s Credit Rating Agencies provides an advanced introduction to the complex phenomenon of credit ratings. It provides up-to-date and meticulous information on credit rating agencies and their regulatory context, and it engages with some complex theoretical issues
The market and the masses: From chaotic corners to social media (re)tail events
Get PDFIn this essay, I examine and discuss the relationship between the market and the masses in light of recent retail-driven surges in the stock prices of firms like GameStop and AMC. Using two historical snapshots, I draw out similarities and differences between the way the collective power and rationality (or lack thereof) of the masses was portrayed in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century market literature and in recent debates about retail investor inclusion and social media or social trading platform-driven market volatility. The main difference between the historical discourse and the present situation is that the new digital market-expanding technologies enable effective retail investor mobilization and thus, increase the retail swarms’ market-moving powers, which were previously less agile and forceful. However, this eased and widened market access also transforms digital life into alternative data that is subjected to age-old strategies of market exploitation
Money as a computational machine
Get PDFThis article presents a speculative philosophical account of money as a computational machine. It does so by leveraging a computational and machinic framework, drawing primarily from the work of Philip Mirowski and Jean Cartelier. The argument is focused on a specific level of abstraction, i.e., the monetary operations involved in the creation and transfer of units of account, asking whether it is possible to view these operations as computations that mediate economic relations. As the primary function of such a machine would be one of social coordination, the article also highlights the political consequences of its implementation across society
The ‘fintech revolution’ is here! The disruptive impact of fintech on retail financial practices
Get PDFFintech is celebrated for its disruptive and democratizing qualities that dis/reintermediates the finance value chain. Claims of a ‘fintech revolution’ assume that fintech is ‘disruptive’ because of its innovative capabilities, but the extent to which these disruptive forces have reconfigured consumer financial knowledge and practices is not well understood. Using a questionnaire to survey retail consumers in Singapore on their use of fintech in performing different financial tasks, this article critically examines these claims of disruption and democratization by grounding them in the financial behaviors of consumers as informed by a financial ecologies approach. The results show a limited impact of fintech in shaping consumer financial behaviors. Respondents use fintech mainly for basic transactional purposes like making mobile payments and account management, but not so much for more complex matters like savings, investing and credit. The findings also reveal a ‘stickiness’ in financial behaviors that emphasizes the high touch points of human interaction. This study illustrates fintech’s variegated material outcomes by highlighting the unevenness in consumption of digital financial services and the enduring importance of human relationality in financial decision making
Bitcoin and stone money: Anglophone use of Yapese economic cultures, 1910-2020
Get PDFRecently parallels have been drawn between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money. This article focuses on Fitzpatrick and McKeon’s (2019) exploration of similarities and differences. The analogy between Bitcoin and Yapese stone money is based on proposed commonalities that are inaccurate, ill-defined, and/or trivial. However, this does not signal a need to refine the comparison, but rather a need to reconsider the rationale for attempting it in the first place. Recent attempts to redefine Yapese stone money using terminology from the field of cryptocurrency reproduces a longer textual history in which writers from the Global North have misrepresented Yap for pedagogic or polemic convenience. Examples include works by William Furness III, John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman, and influential macroeconomics textbooks, such as N. Gregory Mankiw’s Macroeconomics. This history features frequent colonialist tropes of Yap as well as the erasure of histories of colonial violence and power. More caution should be exercised in the study and pedagogic use of Yapese economic cultures, and greater effort should be made to center Yapese voices, acknowledge colonial contexts, and reflect positionality and uncertainty
Financialization re-imagined
Get PDFSpeculative Communities is not just another critique of neoliberal-financial capitalism. It is a novel and audacious attempt to construct a conceptual framework with which it becomes possible to articulate and address major questions concerning our economies, our financial system, our democratic institutions, and our increasingly digital technology-mediated lives
Re-Skilling: Enron and the white- collarization and financialization of the energy industry
Get PDFIn Risk and Ruin, Gavin Benke argues that we ignore Enron’s history and failures to our peril. The book provides a readable account that includes lots of rich history, institutional detail, and salacious anecdotes, making a convincing case for Enron as a harbinger of financial, environmental, and production crises yet to come in the first decades of the twenty-first century
After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond
Get PDFThe crisis of 2008 was a watershed event for the study of finance and society. There was the boom in financial markets that came to a head with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and there was the boom in financial scholarship that followed in its wake. But what comes after this second boom? After more than a decade of rapid expansion under the shadow of 2008, what comes next for the new finance studies? What are the emerging debates that matter most? Where lies the need for further theorisation and for new empirical work? In this editorial, these questions are pursued under three broad headings, each corresponding to an overarching imperative: first, the need to keep a vigilant watch on the core institutions and logics of finance; second, the need to continue expanding and deepening the field; and third, the need to persist with difficult lines of questioning.
 
Tokyo’s booms and busts: Placing Japan in the global financial network
Get PDFTokyo is conspicuous for its now decades-long absence in the headlines of global financial news. In this article, we revisit the evolution of Tokyo as an international financial centre through the lens of Global Financial Networks (GFN). Drawing on insights from high-level interviews, we present a chronology of Japan’s financial history between 1980 and 2020. This reveals a pattern wherein financial sector reforms and financial centre initiatives are repeatedly interrupted by crises. The GFN framework helps to demonstrate how structure and agency intertwine at the global, national, and local scales to shape this reform-boosterism- crisis cycle. Nationally and locally, we find that despite repeated attempts by coalitions of actors to elevate the status of Tokyo, engrained cultural and political economic conditions have hindered its development into a truly global financial centre. Globally, these conditions have been structured and amplified by Japan’s historical position as a rule-taker in the governance of international finance. These factors have conspired to situate Japan on the periphery of the GFN, a position aggravated by the rising financial power of China