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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Who’s down with OCC(’s Definition of ‘Banks’)?”
Steve Mann
This suggests we need to throw out the old theories [of inflation]. Something about them is fundamentally wrong, yet they linger for lack of alternatives. We need to develop new ones.
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Notes Toward a Theory of Inflation”
Nadav Orian Peer
Like many other countries, the U.S. money supply consists primarily of deposits created by private commercial banks. How we understand bank money creation matters enormously.
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Money Creation and Bank Clearing”
Nathan Tankus, Modern Money Network
For the past 40 years, there has been a global macroeconomic consensus that mon- etary policy—and specifically interest rate management policy and financial asset purchase/sale policy—should take the lead in stabilizing the domestic economy. As a factual matter, this consensus has accompanied rising inequality, weak nominal wage growth and intensifying ecological devastation.
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The New Monetary Policy: Reimagining Demand Management and Price Stability in the 21st Century”
Michael Ehrmann & Alena Wabitsch
Central banks have intensified their communication with non-experts – an endeavour which some argue will fail. This paper studies English and German tweets about the ECB to show that its communication is received by non-experts, i.e. is not a road to nowhere.
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Central bank communication with non-experts – A road to nowhere?”
Andrew Konove
This article examines three eighteenth-century projects to replace shopkeeper tokens in Spanish America with copper coins minted in Spain.
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In search of a decent coin: the value of small change in Bourbon Spanish America”
Karina Patricio Ferreira Lima
We introduce the hypothesis that the SBA violated the core purposes of the IMF as per its Articles of Agreement and, therefore, constitutes an ultra vires act.
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The IMF’s 2018 Stand-By Arrangement with Argentina: An Ultra Vires Act?”
Dana Velasco Murillo
Indigenous people played a critical though unacknowledged role in the discovery of silver in sixteenth-century Spanish America.
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‘To search and claim’: indigenous prospectors, silver mining, and legal practices in Spanish America, 1530–1600”
Jens van ‘t Klooster
Despite anticipated curtailment of their powers, the past decade saw technocratic actors take on an increasingly powerful role in economic governance.
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Technocratic Keynesianism: a paradigm shift without legislative change”
December 10, 2021
Harvard Law Review
Thus, this Note concludes, the legal history of price controls exemplifies neoliberalism’s most impressive achievement: to make the form of politics it opposes not illegal, but irrational.
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Price and Sovereignty”
David M. Batt
This article analyses the 1783 proposal to issue readymade notes to the Bank of England's private banking customers.
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The 1783 Proposal for a Readymade Note at the Bank of England”
Laetitia Lenel
The article investigates the methods and conceptions of statistical inference used in business forecasting in the United States and in Europe in the 1920s.
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Searching for a Tide Table for Business: Interwar Conceptions of Statistical Inference in Business Forecasting”
Roger Svensson
This essay explores the material origins of gold coinage to argue that enslaved gold miners built the metallic foundations of America’s financial system.
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Periodic Recoinage and Economic Development in Medieval Hessen”
Barry Eichengreen
Over time, there has been a tendency for political jurisdictions and residents to converge on a single currency.
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From Commodity to Fiat and Now to Crypto: What Does History Tell Us?”
Ann Marsh Daly
This essay explores the material origins of gold coinage to argue that enslaved gold miners built the metallic foundations of America’s financial system.
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“Every Dollar Brought from the Earth”: Money, Slavery, and Southern Gold Mining”
Barbora Černušáková
This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by focusing on racialization of labor in the post-socialist context.
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Roma Workers under Czech Racial Capitalism: A Post-Socialist Case Study”
John Haskell
This essay examines an emerging epistemological conjuncture between what might loosely be identified as two (primarily) academic camps: economists subscribing to “modern money theory” (MMT) and international lawyers associated with “critical” traditions within the discipline.
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Modern Money Theory and International Law”
Fathimath Musthaq
The 2008 financial crisis saw central banks introduce a variety of tools to shore up the financial system, including unconventional measures that made use of central bank balance sheets to directly shape markets. This paper argues that central banks increasingly rely on unconventional tools in noncrisis times to maintain confidence in an unstable financial system.
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Unconventional central banking and the politics of liquidity”
Adam Hayes
This essay makes the case that current debates about the ‘moneyness’ of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are occurring at the incorrect scale.
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World monies or money-worlds: A new perspective on cryptocurrencies and their moneyness”
Oliver Pahnecke & Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky
This Article proposes an innovative and human rights-based interpretation of interest rates applied to public and private loans where interest rate and risk premium are adjusted after the full payment of the principal.
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Interest Rates and Human Rights: Reinterpreting Risk Premiums to Adjust the Financial Economy”
Mehrsa Baradaran
The financial crisis of 2008 made clear to the public, in a way that had not been apparent for some time, that banks depend for their existence and operation on a structural framework created by the federal government.
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Postal Banking’s Public Benefits”
Leon Wansleben
Capital evidently is not just a legal code, but also constitutes a financial accounting entity that emerges from processes of investment, which are embedded in (economic, social, political) structures that are facilitative of unequal distributions of rewards and risks.
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Capitalization and its Legal Friends”
Robert C. Hockett & Saule T. Omarova
Much American electoral and policy debate now centers on how best to reignite the nation's economic dynamism and rebuild its competitive strength.
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Private Wealth and Public Goods: A Case for a National Investment Authority”
Jacqueline Best, Colin Hay, Genevieve LeBaron & Daniel Mügge
Contemporary political economy is predicated on widely shared ideas and assumptions, some explicit but many implicit, about the past. The aim of this Special Issue is to draw attention to, and to assess critically, these historical assumptions.
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Seeing and Not-seeing Like a Political Economist: The Historicity of Contemporary Political Economy and its Blind Spots”
Chloë Kennedy
This article examines criminal law responses to counterfeit currency (notes and coins) in Scotland during a period of rapid commercialization.
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Counterfeit Currency and the Criminal Law in Commercialising Scotland”
Aaron Wistar
The $21-trillion market in U.S. government securities is the “deepest and most liquid fixed-income market in the world.” Except, of course, when it isn’t.
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Who Needs the Government Securities Market?”
Michael R. Glass & Sean H. Vanatta
Between 1940 and 1965, state-level officials changed the relationship between two pillars of the postwar social contract: secure retirement and modern public schools.
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The Frail Bonds of Liberalism: Pensions, Schools, and the Unraveling of Fiscal Mutualism in Postwar New York”
Jens van ‘t Klooster
This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art in constitutional theory with regard to the topic of central banks.
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Central Banks”
Oscar Lopez & Ephrat Livni
El Salvador on Tuesday became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, allowing the cryptocurrency to be used in any transaction, from buying a cup of coffee to paying taxes.
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In Global First, El Salvador Adopts Bitcoin as Currency”
Stephen Mayeaux
One of the first to catch my eye was a set of documents from the Cortes, the legislative body of Spain. Published in 1593, Acts of the “Cortes” held in the village of Madrid in the year 1588 gives us a look at matters the Cortes considered important enough to address. Among other interesting subjects, these documents show concern over the kingdom’s financial difficulties.
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Who’s to Blame for Lost Silver and Gold? Laments of Financial Troubles in Spain 1588”
Nina Perdomo
This document is a highlight of the Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents collection because it explores the case of Goyeneche, charged with counterfeiting Spanish coin, while allowing modern readers to gain insight into the economic status of Spain in the 1600s.
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Criminals and Coins: Understanding 17th Century Spanish Economy through Counterfeit Currency”
Ariel Ron and Sofia Valeonti
Both sides in the U.S. Civil War financed military spending by issuing new fiat currencies. The Union “greenback” underwent moderate inflation (by wartime standards), but the Confederate “grayback” suffered hyperinflation.
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The Money War: An Interpretation of Democracy, Depreciation, and Taxes in the U.S. Civil War”
Hubert Horan
The urban car service firm Uber is currently the most highly valued private startup company in the world, with a venture capital valuation of over $68 billion based on direct investment of over $13 billion from numerous prominent Silicon Valley investors. Uber’s investors are not merely seeking a share of a still-competitive urban car service industry, but are openly pursuing global industry dominance and its huge valuation is based on expectations that it will be successful.
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Will the Growth of Uber Increase Economic Welfare?”
Christine A. Desan
Like the law of payments, the legal design of money shapes the economy itself.
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Money’s Design Elements: Debt, Liquidity, and the Pledge of Value from Medieval Coin to Modern “Repo””
Quentin Ravelli
Though the social consequences of financialization are well-known, their influence on radical politics remains unclear.
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Debt struggles: How financial markets gave birth to a working-class movement”