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.
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’)?”
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
‘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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
“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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
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. More “Current Scholarship
The Frail Bonds of Liberalism: Pensions, Schools, and the Unraveling of Fiscal Mutualism in Postwar New York”