To explain the pronounced instability of the world economy since the 1970s, the book offers an important and systematic theoretical examination of money and finance. It re-examines the classical foundations of political economy and the creator of money. It assesses all of the important theoretical schools since then, including Marxist, Keynesian, post-Keynesian and monetarist thinkers. By presenting important insights from Japanese political economy previously ignored in Anglo-Saxon economics, the authors make a significant contribution to radical political economy based on a thorough historical analysis of capitalism.
The essays in this book describe and analyze the current contours of the international financial system, covering both developed and developing countries, and focusing on the ways in which the current international financial system structures, and is affected by, profound inequalities in the international system. This keen analysis of key topics in international finance takes a heterodox perspective, with focus on the role of inequalities in power in shaping the structure and outcomes in the international sphere.
The Great Financial Crisis that began in 2007-2008 reminds us with devastating force that financial instability and crises are endemic to capitalist economies. This Handbook describes the theoretical, institutional, and historical factors that can help us understand the forces that create financial crises.
This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the messy and crisis-ridden relationship between the operations of capitalist finance, global capital flows, and state power in emerging markets. The politics, drivers of emergence, and diversity of these myriad forms of state power are explored in light of the positionality of emerging markets within the network of space and power relations that characterises contemporary global finance. The book develops a multi-disciplinary perspective and combines insights from Marxist political economy, post-Keynesian economics, economic geography, and postcolonial and feminist International Political Economy. Alami comprehensively reviews the theories, histories, and geographies of cross-border finance management, and develops a conceptual framework which allows unpacking the complex entanglement of constraint and opportunities, of growing integration and tight discipline, that cross-border finance represents for emerging markets. Extensive fieldwork research provides an in-depth comparative critical interrogation of the policies and regulations deployed in Brazil and South Africa. This volume will be especially useful to those researching and working in the areas of international political economy, contemporary geographies of money and finance, and critical development studies. It should also prove of interest to policy makers, practitioners, and activists concerned with the relation between finance and development in emerging markets and beyond.
Combining balance sheet analysis with historical institutional analysis, this book traces the evolution of social sector financial balance sheets in the US from 1960 to 2018. This innovative historical-institutional approach, ranging from the micro level of households to the macro level of the federal government, reveals that the displacement of households by banks has been a long-term process. This gradual compounding of financialization is at odds with widely accepted views about financialization, contemporary banking theory, financial intermediation theory, and post-Keynesian and endogenous money approaches. The book returns to time-tested traditional principles of banking and taps unexpected affinities about market failures in transaction cost economics, financial intermediation theory, and core ideas in classic modern political and social economy about economic moralities and social reactions of self-defense against unfettered markets. This book provides an alternative explanation for the rise of finance and new ways to think about averting financialization and its devastating consequences. This book marks a significant contribution to the literature on financialization, social economics, banking, and the American political economy.
A cutting-edge look at how accelerating financial change, from the end of cash to the rise of cryptocurrencies, will transform economies for better and worse. We think weÕve seen financial innovation. We bank from laptops and buy coffee with the wave of a phone. But these are minor miracles compared with the dizzying experiments now underway around the globe, as businesses and governments alike embrace the possibilities of new financial technologies. As Eswar Prasad explains, the world of finance is at the threshold of major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of physical cash. The driving force wonÕt be phones or credit cards but rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the worst of what is to come.
Finally, the authors outline the reforms necessary to create monetary, financial and banking systems free of the episodic inflation, devaluation, debt crises, and exchange rate volatility that have plagued the twentieth century.
