Author: Lily Ginsburg

Live Zoom Panel - Wednesday, April 19, 11 am - 12 pm ET
Reminder: Sociological Perspectives on the Bank Failures of 2023

Zoom link: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/92491232615
Following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, as well as the forced acquisition of Credit Suisse, banks are back in the headlines. This panel considers recent events in light of the flowering of sociological research since the financial crisis of 2008.

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Reminder: Sociological Perspectives on the Bank Failures of 2023”

Current Scholarship
New York Times Podcast: A Radical Way of Thinking About Money with Morgan Ricks

We discuss what lessons banking regulators missed from the Great Recession; the need to panic-proof the entire financial system; the government’s role in insuring or backstopping deposits; what it would mean for the government to start treating money as a public good for us all; and more.
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New York Times Podcast: A Radical Way of Thinking About Money with Morgan Ricks”

Current Scholarship
How a Firm Profiting From Deposit Insurance Caps Is Lobbying to Keep Them

How a Firm Profiting From Deposit Insurance Caps Is Lobbying to Keep Them

A company called IntraFi offers two products that allow large depositors to spread their money among a network of hundreds of banks. If deposit insurance were uncapped, their business model would be worthless. It’s a full-court press to maintain a lucrative status quo.
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How a Firm Profiting From Deposit Insurance Caps Is Lobbying to Keep Them”

Current Scholarship
Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?

Isabella M. Weber and Evan Wasner, University of Massachusetts Amherst

The US COVID-19 inflation is predominantly a sellers’ inflation that derives from the ability of firms with market power to hike prices. Policy should aim to contain price hikes at the impulse stage to prevent inflation from the onset.
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Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?”

Current Scholarship
From Cannabis to Crypto: Federal Reserve Discretion in Payments

Julie Andersen Hill, University of Alabama - School of Law

This article shows that while the Federal Reserve has some discretion over the payments it processes and terms under which it offers it payments services, the Fed’s discretion is not so broad as to allow it to reject access requests from legally eligible banks. If the Fed wants to exclude banks, it should ask Congress to change the law.
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From Cannabis to Crypto: Federal Reserve Discretion in Payments”

Current Scholarship
Food, Money & Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient & Equitable Communities of Work

Benjamin C. Wilson, Taylor Reid & Max Sussman

Without reliable access to monetary resources, collective provisioning systems are vulnerable to financial crisis and collapse. Alleviating these vulnerabilities requires that monetary systems adopt collective coordination principles. Accordingly, this paper presents small and medium-scale monetary experiments that use food systems as a way to build community capacity.
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Food, Money & Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient & Equitable Communities of Work”

Current Scholarship
Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty

Luke Herrine, University of Alabama School of Law

The central legal focus of the Article is the prohibition on “unfair acts or practices” shared by many federal and state agencies with consumer protection jurisdiction. The descriptive and normative arguments of this Article explain why it is now at the center of the action—and why that should be welcomed.
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Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty”

Current Scholarship
The ‘climate shift’ in central banks: how field arbitrageurs paved the way for climate stress testing

Stine Quorning, Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark

The article contributes to the study of the political economy of central banks, investigating how discussions of climate change entered central banks and highlighting an underexplored form of ‘infrastructural entanglement’ between finance, the state bureaucracy, and central banks.
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The ‘climate shift’ in central banks: how field arbitrageurs paved the way for climate stress testing”

Current Scholarship
Caught between Frontstage and Backstage: The Failure of the Federal Reserve to Halt Rule Evasion in the Financial Crisis of 1974

Pierre-Christian Fink, Harvard University and Hebrew University Jerusalem

Based on original archival evidence from the financial crisis of 1974, this article discusses regulators who publicly pretend to stay within their mandate, which renders re-regulation of rule evasion less likely. The finding contributes a new explanation for why periods of instability so rarely lead to change.
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Caught between Frontstage and Backstage: The Failure of the Federal Reserve to Halt Rule Evasion in the Financial Crisis of 1974”

Announcement
New Book by Joseph Vogl

Capital and Ressentiment: A Short Theory of the Present

The fusing of finance capital and information has provided ideal conditions on social media in which feelings of anger and frustration can be expressed and shared, forming a deep pool of ressentiment that is being drawn upon and exploited by populist and authoritarian leaders.
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New Book by Joseph Vogl”

Current Scholarship
Risk, Discretion, and Bank Supervision

Peter Conti-Brown (University of Pennsylvania) and Sean Vanatta (University of Glasgow)

Using the rich history of supervision in the United States from the antebellum period to the present, this article presents a theoretical conception of supervision as the space where bankers and the government engage each other in sometimes cooperative, sometimes contentious disputes with substantial influence on the direction of financial and economic policy.
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Risk, Discretion, and Bank Supervision”

Current Scholarship
New Symposium on “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities” by Ricks, Sitaraman, Welton, and Menand

Morgan Ricks, Ganesh Sitaraman, Shelley Welton, and Lev Menand

Networks, Platforms, and Utilities (NPU) is the first entirely new casebook integrating NPU law in a quarter century—and the first with some temporal distance from the deregulatory movement of the late twentieth century. The book thus contributes to larger intellectual shifts in the academy and public policy.
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New Symposium on “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities” by Ricks, Sitaraman, Welton, and Menand”

Announcement
Reminder: Intersections of finance and society 2023 CFP closes May 1!

Reminder: Call for Papers for Intersections of finance and society 2023 will close on May 1st. Contributors are expressly invited to propose and debate existing and novel solutions for improving financial stability, expanding fintech inclusion, mitigating climate breakdown, and tackling the inequalities associated with financialisation.
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Reminder: Intersections of finance and society 2023 CFP closes May 1!”

Announcement
Finance and Society Network CFP: Intersections of finance and society 2023 in Brussels (September 14-15)

Call for Papers open for Intersections of finance and society 2023, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, 14-15 September. Contributors are expressly invited to propose and debate existing and novel solutions for improving financial stability, expanding fintech inclusion, mitigating climate breakdown, and tackling the inequalities associated with financialisation.
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Finance and Society Network CFP: Intersections of finance and society 2023 in Brussels (September 14-15)”

Current Scholarship
Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics Volume 3, Number 2

Editorial Group, Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics

One possible reading of the current issue is that we invite readers to ponder historical hauntings of modern political economies, including "austerity haunting 'noncapitalist' contexts," "the history of money haunting modern-day understandings of central bank digital currencies," "colonialism haunting African development," and more.
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Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics Volume 3, Number 2”

Current Scholarship
Paper Money of a ‘Peculiar Character’: The Notes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1820-1870

Michael Ryan, International Bank Note Society

The Hudson's Bay Company issued promissory notes from 1820 to 1870 that served as paper money in the Red River Colony. These notes are a fascinating artefact of the fur trade, which played an important role in the earliest phase of European engagement with Canada and the US.
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Paper Money of a ‘Peculiar Character’: The Notes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1820-1870”

Fall 2022 - Money, Sanctions and International Law
Sanctions and Decoupling After Neoliberalism

David Singh Grewal, UC Berkeley
We are once again in the awful position of testing the proposition that commercial integration among nations leads to peace. And, to the extent that it clearly does not, we are left wondering about how effective either monetary and economic sanctions can be—and, more broadly, what economic “decoupling” looks like in a post-neoliberal world.
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Sanctions and Decoupling After Neoliberalism”

Current Scholarship
The Financialization of U.S. Public Pensions, 1945-1974

Sean Vanatta, University of Glasgow

This article examines a major transformation in public employee pension investment in the United States. Ultimately, financialization was not the product of a radical break or crisis in the 1970s, but was a continuous process in the post-World War II era, one initially pursued by state and local government officials in service of welfare liberalism.
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The Financialization of U.S. Public Pensions, 1945-1974”

Current Scholarship
After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond

Amin Samman, University of London

In this editorial, three overarching imperatives are explored: 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.
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After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond”

Fall 2022 - Money, Sanctions and International Law
International Law and 21st Century Financial Warfare

Suzanne Katzenstein, Duke University; Stephen Park, University of Connecticut
Financial sanctions of the current scope and magnitude can no longer be relied upon to enforce international law in a manner that complies with it. Relying on international law to constrain the impacts of warfare—here, financial warfare—may also risk legitimizing its expanding use.
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International Law and 21st Century Financial Warfare”

Announcement
Assistant Professor in Finance and Globalization at the University of California, Santa Barbara

The Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenure-track faculty position at the level of Assistant Professor, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2023. The Department is looking for individuals with expertise in Finance in relation to Globalization.


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Assistant Professor in Finance and Globalization at the University of California, Santa Barbara”

Current Scholarship
Special Issue from Journal of Cultural Economy: FinTech in Africa

Paul Langley, Durham University, and Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Boston University
By re-centering global social science research agendas and political debates on Africa, this special issue hopes to inspire further work and future political engagement with FinTech which doesn’t begin, by default, from developments and experiences in the Global West and East.
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Special Issue from Journal of Cultural Economy: FinTech in Africa”

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Introduction: The Structural Power of Finance Meets Financialization

Natalya Naqvi et. al., London School of Economics

The contributions to this special issue engage with how decades of financialization have transformed the basis of structural power toward alternative functions that have gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These include household and real estate lending that fuels consumption-led growth, concentration and expansion of financial institutions as tools of geo-economic strategy, financing current account deficits that facilitate global imbalances, and wealth preservation that bolsters inequality.
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Introduction: The Structural Power of Finance Meets Financialization”

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Financialization, Structural Power, and the Global Financial Crisis for Europe’s Core and Periphery

Nina Eichacker, University of Rhode Island

As Eurozone governments consider how to respond to crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic going forward, policies that more equitably support governments rescuing domestic financial actors should be considered in tandem with broader financial regulations of structurally important economic institutions.
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Financialization, Structural Power, and the Global Financial Crisis for Europe’s Core and Periphery”