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
More “Current Scholarship
New York Times Podcast: A Radical Way of Thinking About Money with Morgan Ricks”
Christine Desan, Lev Menand, Raúl Carillo, Rohan Grey, Dan Rohde, and Hillary J. Allen offer their
More “Current Scholarship
SIX REACTIONS TO THE SILICON VALLEY BANK DEBACLE”
Nadav Orian Peer, Associate Professor, Colorado Law, and Just Money Editor - March 15, 2023
Recording Available: "Virtual Teach-In: The Failure of Silicon Valley Bank."
JustMoney editor Nadav Orian Peer discussed the conditions that led to SVB's failure; policy response by regulators; and broader economic context.
More “Announcement
Virtual Teach-In: The Failure of Silicon Valley Bank”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
How a Firm Profiting From Deposit Insurance Caps Is Lobbying to Keep Them”
Opinion | by Lev Menand and Morgan Ricks - Washington Post - March 15, 2023
The time has come for Congress to scrap the $250,000 cap on deposit insurance coverage, strengthen regulatory oversight accordingly and charge banks much more for operating a government-backed deposit business.
More “Current Scholarship
Scrap the Bank Deposit Insurance Limit”
Paul Sheard
Money permeates our everyday lives—it literally makes the economic world go round—and yet confusion and controversy about money abound.
More “Current Scholarship
The Power of Money”
Jane Ihrig, Gretchen Weinbach & Scott Wolla, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, USA
This article walks through the roles of banks and the Federal Reserve (the Fed) in the financial system and describes the key linkages between the two, using current concepts.
More “Current Scholarship
How are Banks and the Fed Linked? Teaching Key Concepts Today”
Sandeep Vaheesan, Open Markets Institute
For nearly a century, the private view of money has prevailed. But the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 offers a glimpse of money as a public instrument. Is this law the breach in the dam of scarce, private money?
More “Current Scholarship
Money as an Instrument for Justice”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
From Cannabis to Crypto: Federal Reserve Discretion in Payments”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Food, Money & Democracy: Cultivating Collective Provisioning for Resilient & Equitable Communities of Work”
Martha McCluskey, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
How can a Law and Political Economy approach guide the power of taxation toward democracy, justice, and a livable planet? Taxation should be viewed as one of several interrelated strategies for mobilizing the public power of money to re-orient both economy and the state.
More “Current Scholarship
Tax Policy for a Climate in Crisis”
Jeffrey Sklansky, University of Illinois at Chicago
The essay points to a fertile field for further study: as retirees have increasingly relied on professional asset managers and caregivers, the finance and health sectors have undergone converging crises over fiduciary duty and elder care, posing parallel challenges for organized labor.
More “Current Scholarship
The Work of Retirement”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
The ‘climate shift’ in central banks: how field arbitrageurs paved the way for climate stress testing”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Caught between Frontstage and Backstage: The Failure of the Federal Reserve to Halt Rule Evasion in the Financial Crisis of 1974”
Dan Rohde, SJD Harvard Law School
This article provides a legal-political history of that early contest over Canadian money and sovereignty, and explores the way in which Upper Canada’s Reformers put forth a critique of bank-issued money that remains relevant today.
More “Current Scholarship
The Bank of the People, 1835-1840: Law and Money in Upper Canada”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Risk, Discretion, and Bank Supervision”
Matthias Thiemann (Sciences Po), Tim Büttner, and Oliver Kessler
The issue of climate change has altered the self-understanding of central bankers and driven them towards a more active stance where they acknowledge that central bankers shape and make, and not only ‘mirror’, market forces.
More “Current Scholarship
Beyond market neutrality? Central banks and the problem of climate change”
Kris James Mitchener, Santa Clara University, and Eric Monnet, Paris School of Economics
Utilizing a novel, hand-collected historical daily dataset on loans to commercial banks, we analyze how personal connections matter for lending of last resort, highlighting the importance of governance for this core function of central banks.
More “Current Scholarship
Connected Lending of Last Resort”
Carolyn Sissoko, University of the West of England
The paper argues that a change in the Bank of England’s commercial discount policy at the end of the Seven Years’ War promoted the growth of banking.
More “Current Scholarship
Why Lancashire? Banking As the Spark That Set Off Industrialization”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics Volume 3, Number 2”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Paper Money of a ‘Peculiar Character’: The Notes of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1820-1870”
Jakob Hoffmann and Johannes Glückler, Heidelberg University
This article analyzes the structure of socially embedded exchange under uncertainty in the context of a community currency system in Germany.
More “Current Scholarship
Navigating uncertainty in networks of social exchange: a relational event study of a community currency system”
Vijay Raghavan, Brooklyn Law School
This Article argues that the tax on cancelled debt is the product of broader political forces and not just the internal logic of tax, and it concludes by proposing changes to tax administration and the tax code that would sharply circumscribe the scope of the tax.
More “Current Scholarship
The Case Against the Debt Tax”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
The Financialization of U.S. Public Pensions, 1945-1974”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond”
Prabhat Patnaik, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Economics is a subject where the ruling classes are forever trying to promote ideologically-motivated explanations in lieu of scientific ones.
More “Current Scholarship
Economics and Dishonesty”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Special Issue from Journal of Cultural Economy: FinTech in Africa”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Introduction: The Structural Power of Finance Meets Financialization”
Nathan Coombs, University of Edinburgh, and Matthias Thiemann, Sciences Po
This special issue argues that to make sense of the increased prominence of central banks after the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic requires interrogating the sources of and limits to their governmental power.
More “Current Scholarship
Special Issue from Economy and Society: Recentering Central Banks”
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.
More “Current Scholarship
Financialization, Structural Power, and the Global Financial Crisis for Europe’s Core and Periphery”
Jacqueline Best, School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa
How do central bankers cope with the uncomfortable fact that there are significant limits to their expertise without losing authority?
More “Current Scholarship
Uncomfortable knowledge in central banking: Economic expertise confronts the visibility dilemma”
Finance and Society: Volume 9 Out Now!
The issue features a keynote essay by Janet Roitman on platform economies beyond the North-South divide. Research articles address climate change central banking, property valuation in Brazil, and the ‘Edges of the financial imagination.’ It is fully open-access!
More “Current Scholarship
Finance and Society: Volume 9, Number 1 (2023) Out Now!”
James Christopher Mizes and Kevin P. Donovan, Université Paris-Dauphine and University of Edinburgh
In this issue, our contributors explore new modes of popular and professional reasoning about finance in Africa by Africans, and their specific struggles over how to know, value and manage capital.
More “Current Scholarship
Capitalizing Africa – High finance from below”
Carolyn Sissoko, University of the West of England
This paper sets forth a framework modeling the traditional ‘banking approach’ to central bank liquidity provision and advocates a return to it. These reforms must be accompanied by a clear policy that in the event that any bank requires re-capitalization by the government, existing shareholder interests will be wiped out, and ownership will be transferred to the government.
More “Current Scholarship
Financial dominance: why the ‘market maker of last resort’ is a bad idea and what to do about it”
Andrew J. Douglas, Morehouse College
The article underscores an increasingly important point: all members of a campus community ought to be deeply concerned about institutional debt. A campaign against institutional debt at HBCUs could be a powerful initiative of the AAUP’s Committee on Historically Black Institutions and Scholars of Color, and it could help to draw more HBCU faculty into the push for a New Deal for Higher Education.
More “Current Scholarship
Battling Institutional Debt at HBCUs”
Christine Desan, Harvard Law School
Neoclassical and credit approaches to money represent dramatically different theories of value. According to the way money is created, individuals will not be equally situated in the process that generates prices.
More “Current Scholarship
The Key to Value (2.0): The Debate Over Commensurability in Neoclassical and Credit Approaches to Money”
Peter Conti-Brown, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Brookings Institution; and Brian D. Feinstein, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 has failed to meaningfully reduce the prevalence of “banking deserts” across lower-income communities or to reduce the racial wealth gap. As a corrective, banks should be graded on a curve, which would enable the CRA to fulfill its promise: to expand access to credit, spur investment in overlooked areas, and combat racial inequities through the financial system.
More “Current Scholarship
Banking on a Curve: How to Restore the Community Reinvestment Act”
Alexis Montambault Trudelle, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
What kind of power relations are maintained or established in the process of sovereign wealth funds development? This article contributes to rentier state debates and broader political economy scholarship by showing how state investment funds hinge on ancillary networks of social institutions, often generated from ingrained formal and informal interactions between states and society.
More “Current Scholarship
Towards a sociology of state investment funds? sovereign wealth funds and state-business relations in Saudi Arabia”
Sebastian Diessner, Leiden University, The Hague, Netherlands
This article argues that policy-makers’ non-expert or ‘folk’ ideas can affect policy outcomes in a way that challenges the assumption of economic policy-making being guided by expert ideas emanating from the realm of economics and other sciences.
More “Current Scholarship
The power of folk ideas in economic policy and the central bank–commercial bank analogy”
Christopher Gibson, California State University, Fullerton
How does financialization of the economy impact public governance of natural resources? This article interrogates the influence that financial markets have over public policy, showing that elected governance officials engage in the commodification of money, encouraging the further commodification of environmental resources.
More “Current Scholarship
Financialized savings in public water governance: An illustrative case study in the arid American West”
Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima, University of Leeds School of Law
This article reconceptualizes sovereign insolvency from a money-centred perspective. Sovereign insolvencies are inherent to the asymmetric character of global liquidity, rather than solely the product of fiscal misfortunes or mismanagement. To correct those asymmetries, it is necessary to reset the international monetary system.
More “Current Scholarship
Sovereign Solvency as Monetary Power”
David Fox, University of Edinburgh
This paper scratches beneath the doctrinal analysis of gold clauses to the commercial and political purposes served by such clauses. It considers gold-clause contracts as historical instances of the early international bond markets in operation, and the litigation over them as one reaction to the financial instability of the era.
More “Current Scholarship
Gold Clauses in the Capital Markets of the Early Twentieth Century”
Martijn Konings, University of Sydney
The Federal Reserve’s bid to “get wages down” reflects the enduring hold of neoliberal thought at the highest levels of economic policymaking.
More “Current Scholarship
The Asset Economy Strikes Again”
This paper sheds light on an overlooked issue in economics, namely the social responsibility of central banks in a democracy.
More “Current Scholarship
Louis-Philippe Rochon & Guillaume Vallet, The institutions of the people, by the people and for the people? Addressing central banks’ power and social responsibility in a democracy”
Joshua R. Greenberg’s Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic transports readers back to a time when ordinary Americans understood the rules of the monetary system because they had to.
More “Current Scholarship
Katie Moore, Review of Joshua R. Greenberg, Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic”
Adam Tooze, Columbia University
[The Currency of Politics] offers an urgent and provocative analysis of political thinking about money from Aristotle to the present.
More “Current Scholarship
Adam Tooze, Chartbook #124 The Currency of Politics”
Matthew A. Bruckner
This article wrestles with a seemingly straightforward question that turns out to be surprisingly complex: what is a bank?
More “Current Scholarship
Who’s down with OCC(’s Definition of ‘Banks’)?”