Fringe Finance

Fringe Finance

Author: Rob Aitken

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-02-11

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1317748360

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The most recent conversations about financial instability in International Political Economy have addressed the ongoing financial spasms of the past five years; a global financial spasm unleashed by the 2008 subprime debacle, ongoing Eurozone instability, and general price volatility in securities markets globally. Alongside and as part of these broader spasms, however, has been another key trend—the intensifying reach of global financial markets into and among those populations which live at its very edges. There are increasing, and increasingly profitable, experiments which are explicitly targeted to those without regular access to full or formalized financial practices. This book places the practices of fringe finance in critical context by situating them within a larger set of discussions in the field. Most importantly, this book is part of a much broader attempt in IPE to rethread the study of finance to questions of cultural and social theory in a meaningful manner. Finance is increasingly subjected to innovative forms of social inquiry influenced by a range of diverse methods including governmentality, actor-network theory and cultural economy. By drawing on several strands of social theory, this book contributes to this broader movement in IPE and helps open more space for the continuation of these interdisciplinary conversations. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of IPE, development studies and economic sociology.


City of Debtors

City of Debtors

Author: Anne Fleming

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2018-01-08

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 0674982053

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Since the rise of the small-sum lending industry in the 1890s, people on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder in the United States have been asked to pay the greatest price for credit. Again and again, Americans have asked why the most fragile borrowers face the highest costs for access to the smallest loans. To protect low-wage workers in need of credit, reformers have repeatedly turned to law, only to face the vexing question of where to draw the line between necessary protection and overreaching paternalism. City of Debtors shows how each generation of Americans has tackled the problem of fringe finance, using law to redefine the meaning of justice within capitalism for those on the economic margins. Anne Fleming tells the story of the small-sum lending industry’s growth and regulation from the ground up, following the people who navigated the market for small loans and those who shaped its development at the state and local level. Fleming’s focus on the city and state of New York, which served as incubators for numerous lending reforms that later spread throughout the nation, differentiates her approach from work that has centered on federal regulation. It also reveals the overlooked challenges of governing a modern financial industry within a federalist framework. Fleming’s detailed work contributes to the broader and ongoing debate about the meaning of justice within capitalistic societies, by exploring the fault line in the landscape of capitalism where poverty, the welfare state, and consumer credit converge.


Fringe Banking in Winnipeg's North End

Fringe Banking in Winnipeg's North End

Author: Jerry Buckland

Publisher: Canadian Centre Policy Alternatives

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 55

ISBN-13: 0886274281

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The geographic boundaries of the North End, as determined by the North End Community Renewal Corporation, is north of the CPR tracks, south of Caruthers Avenue, east of McPhillips Street, and west of the Red River. [...] This 5 In his examination of fringe banking in the US, Caskey (1994, p. 84) argues that a chief reason for their rise is the increase in the number of households without bank accounts, rising from 9.5% of the US population in 1977 to 13.5% in 1989, the result of processes affecting banks (supply side) and bank clients (demand side). [...] The second focus credit risk related to high levels of debt-servicing and personal bankruptcy; the contraction in the bank and finance company supply of non-revolving, unsecured loans; the growing numbers of people with higher credit risk due to increased legal and illegal immigration to the US; the increase in gold prices; the growing awareness among entrepreneurs of the profits in fringe banking [...] Winnipeg and the 16.5% of the population of the North End, North End both have around 13.5% of comprise a smaller percentage at 11.9% their population over the age of retire- of the population of Winnipeg. [...] This is sub- the number of people contributing income stantially higher than the 35% average in to a household, the greater the likelihood the rest of Winnipeg.


The Global Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath

The Global Financial Crisis and Its Aftermath

Author: A.G. Malliaris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-09-06

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 0199386242

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In The Global Financial Crisis, contributors argue that the complexity of the Global Financial Crisis challenges researchers to offer more comprehensive explanations by extending the scope and range of their traditional investigations. To achieve this, the volume views the financial crisis simultaneously through three different lenses---economic, psychological, and social values. Contributors offer a constructive methodology suitable for exploring financial crises. They recognize how current economic analysis did not prepare academic economists, business economists, traders, and regulators to anticipate economic and financial crises. So, they search more extensively within the broader discipline of economics for ideas related to crises but neglected perhaps because they were not mathematically rigorous. They affirm that the complexity of financial crises necessitates complementary research. Thus, to put the focal purpose of this book differently, they explore the Global Financial Crisis from three interconnected frameworks: the standards of orthodox economic analysis, Minskyan economics, and the role of ideas and values in economics. Values are the subject of both philosophy and psychology and can contribute to a better understanding of the Global Financial Crisis. Values, in general, have been relatively neglected by economists. This is not because there is doubt about their significance, but rather because welfare economics and collective choice still operate within the neoclassical paradigm. This volume argues that analyzing the value implications requires moving from the neoclassical framework to something that is broader and multidisciplinary.


The Everyday Life of Global Finance

The Everyday Life of Global Finance

Author: Paul Langley

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2008-05-08

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0191553131

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In the US and UK, saving and borrowing routines have changed radically and become closely bound-up with the capital markets of global finance. As mutual funds have increased in popularity and pension provision has been transformed, many more individuals and households have come to invest in stocks and shares. As consumer borrowing has risen dramatically and mortgage finance has been extended to those deemed sub-prime, so the repayments of credit card holders and mortgagors have provided the basis for the issue and trading of bonds and other market instruments. The Everyday Life of Global Finance explores the unprecedented relationships that now bind society and the markets, challenging the dominant tendency to simply position recent developments in Wall Street and the City of London at the centre of contemporary finance. Grounded in literature from the sociology of finance and international political economy, drawing on the social theory of Callon, Foucault, and Latour, and informed by extensive empirical research, the book shows how global finance has become mundane and ordinary in Anglo-America. Finance is not 'out there somewhere', but is embedded in the calculative technologies and performances of reconfigured saving and borrowing networks, and is embodied through the assembly of everyday financial identities and self-disciplines. Society's new-found relationships with the financial markets are also shown, however, to be marked by stark inequalities, manifest contradictions, and political dissent. The Everyday Life of Global Finance is thus an ambitious and innovative contribution to our understanding of the contemporary financial world.


Between Truth and Power

Between Truth and Power

Author: Julie E. Cohen

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-09-02

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0190246715

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A work of ambitious interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the ways that law and technology interact. Our current legal system is to a great extent the product of an earlier period of social and economic transformation. From the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, as accountability for industrial-age harms became a pervasive source of conflict, the US legal system underwent profound, tectonic shifts. Today, struggles over ownership of information-age resources and accountability for information-age harms are producing new systemic changes. In Between Truth and Power, Julie E. Cohen explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. Systematically examining struggles over the conditions of information flow and the design of information architectures and business models, she argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is too is transforming in fundamental ways. Drawing on elements from legal theory, science and technology studies, information studies, communication studies and organization studies to develop a complex theory of institutional change, Cohen develops an account of the gradual emergence of legal institutions adapted to the information age and of the power relationships that such institutions reflect and reproduce. A tour de force of ambitious interdisciplinary scholarship, Between Truth and Power will transform our thinking about the possible futures of law and legal institutions in the networked information era.


The Finance of British Industry, 1918-1976

The Finance of British Industry, 1918-1976

Author: W.A. Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 113658790X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How has British industry financed itself in the past? With the current debate on industry's financial strategy, this study of the past sixty years is a particularly timely contribution to the discussions on the future financing of industry. This book gives, for the inter-war years, a detailed examination of the main sources of funds, covering long-term and short-term funding. It also traces the transition in the new issue market and explores the course of firms' own internal funds, and ends his coverage of the pre-war years with a chapter on the Macmillan Gap. Dr Thomas puts particular emphasis on the influence of government policy on the financing of industry in post-war Britain. He also explains the effects the new sources of finance have had on industry and the major public corporations. His last chapter surveys the later developments in the main sources and uses of funds and the factors responsible for them, and includes an illuminating comparison of financial practices in some of the major overseas industrial countries. Dr. Thomas has written a clear and objective account describing the trends in finance since the First World War. His notably well-documented book is an essential reference work.


Ethics and Economic Governance

Ethics and Economic Governance

Author: Chris Clarke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-23

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 131736788X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book seeks to explore the ethical dimensions of economic governance through an engagement with Adam Smith and a critical analysis of economistic understandings of the Global Financial Crisis. It examines ethical and political dilemmas associated with key aspects of the financialisation of Anglo-American economy and society, including systems of asset-based welfare, modern risk management and debt. In the wake of the financial crisis, recognition of the way in which everyday lives and life chances are tied into global finance is widespread. Yet few contributions in IPE explicitly tackle this issue as a question of ethics. By developing Adam Smith’s under-utilised account of how market-oriented behaviour is constituted through a process of ‘sympathy’, this book provides an innovative way of understanding contemporary issues of economic governance and the possibilities and limits for intervention within it. By taking Adam Smith’s moral philosophy seriously, it becomes evident that the ever-deeper enmeshing of finance in our everyday lives is a failed experiment. Turning the common understanding of Smith on its head, we can also turn accepted wisdom about the recent financial crisis on its head and see the urgency of making better known the ethico-political contestation that lies at the heart of financial market relations. It will be of interest to students and scholars of IPE as well as those across the social sciences who wish to question the foundations of contemporary economy and society.