Brett Christophers

The limits to financialization

Over the past decade, the concept of financialization has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of scholarly inquiry across several social–scientific disciplines, human geography among them. The subject of a burgeoning, variegated literature advancing both theoretical delineation and empirical substantiation, processes of financialization, on many accounts, belong alongside those of globalization and neoliberalization as the defining dynamics of late modern capitalism. In the spirit of fostering a constructive dialogue, this article develops a broadly based critique of such accounts, one structured around the core idea of limits. Financialization, it suggests, is substantively limited, both as a concept and as the array of real-world processes to which that concept variously pertains. The article identifies and fleshes out five key sets of such limits and the connections between them: analytic, theoretic, strategic, optic, and empiric limits. If the concept of financialization is to do substantially positive descriptive and explanatory work going forward, the article submits, these limits must be explicitly recognized and their implications explicitly factored in. This, the article concludes, is no small challenge.

Centring Housing in Political Economy

Abstract The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been confined to mainstream economics. This paper insists that political-economic analysis can no longer remain relatively indifferent to the housing question since housing is implicated in the contemporary capitalist political economy in numerous critical, connected and very often contradictory ways. The paper conceptualizes this implication by identifying the multiple roles of housing when “capital” – the essential “stuff” of political economy – is considered from the perspective of each of its three primary, mutually constitutive guises: as process of circulation, as social relation and as ideology. Mobilizing these three optics to provide a critical overall picture of housing-in-political-economy (more than a political economy of housing), we draw on and weave together the many vital contributions of housing research to our evolving understanding of capitalism.

Revisiting the Urbanization of Capital

In a recent interview, David Harvey referred to the initial stages of the ongoing global economic crisis as a “financial crisis of urbanization.” This article explores and substantiates Harveys argument by returning to the thesis of capital switching that Harvey, following Henri Lefebvre, initially expounded in the 1970s and 1980s. The nub of this argument was that as capitalist production edges toward periodic crises of overaccumulation, capital “switches” from production per se into production of the urban built environment as a means to absorb surplus capital and hence avert—if only temporarily—crisis. Although Harveys thesis has proven extremely influential among political economists, urban theorists, and geographers of various stripes, previous attempts to buttress it with empirical evidence have failed to unearth any demonstrable switching dynamic of the kind Harvey theorizes. This article analyzes data for the years leading up to 2007 and the unfolding of the current economic crisis. Focusing primarily on the United Kingdom, it presents two separate analyses that suggest a clear pattern of capital switching into the built environment since the turn of the millennium: first, a switching of overall private-sector expenditures and, second, a switching of pension fund investment. Together, the analyses place urbanization, following Harvey, at the heart of contemporary economic crisis.

A monstrous hybrid : the political economy of housing in early-twenty-first century Sweden

In the leftist Western political imagination, Sweden continues, for many, to represent a vision of a ‘better’, more egalitarian political-economic model than the neoliberal capitalism that has come to dominate the Anglo-American world in particular; and its housing system is widely regarded as an integral component of this alternative, social-democratic model. The present paper argues that this envisioning of the political economy of Swedish housing is thoroughly outdated. Yet it insists, equally, that the competing envisioning of Swedish housing advanced by prominent scholars within Sweden – of a radically (neo)liberalised domestic housing system – is not accurate either. Rather, Swedish housing in the early twenty-first century constitutes a complex hybrid of legacy regulated elements on the one hand and neoliberalised elements on the other. Recognising this hybridity is essential, the paper submits, to understanding the nature and source of the most pressing issues facing the Swedish housing sector today. The systems hybridity, moreover, is ‘monstrous’ – following Jane Jacobss coining of the term – in the sense that those issues reveal the pivotal role currently played by the Swedish housing system in the creation, reproduction and intensification of socio-economic inequality.

Banking Across Boundaries : Placing Finance in Capitalism

List of Figures viii List of Abbreviations ix Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 Part I Worlds Apart: Before Keynes 25 1 The Birth of Economic Productiveness 27 2 Instrumental Internationalism 57 Part II Worlds Aligned: From the Great Depression to the Eve of the Big Bang 101 3 Enclosing the Unproductive 103 4 America, and Boundaries Breached 146 Part III Co-Constituted Worlds: The Age of Financialization? 185 5 Layering the Logics of Free Trade in Banking 187 6 Anaemic Geographies of Productive Finance 229 Afterword 275 Index 282

Anaemic Geographies of Financialisation

This paper offers a critique of the increasingly prevalent argument that the late twentieth century saw a ‘financialisation’ of capitalism anchored in the USA, the UK, and other leading Western economies. The objective of the paper is not to claim that there has been no such structural mutation, but that the studies which allegedly demonstrate this mutation are compromised by the anaemic geographies that structure and animate them. Such studies, the paper argues, fetishise the national scale and, in doing so, offer a restricted and potentially misleading reading of trends such as, most notably, historic growth in the share of corporate profits accruing to ‘finance’ within individual countries. Examining empirical data for the UK, but explicitly incorporating the international perspective typically missing from existing studies of financialisation, the paper points to the vital role of international expansion by UK financial institutions in growing the financial sectors share of profits. Whether so-called ‘financialisation’ has also contributed to this growth remains, the paper submits, open to question.

Complexity, finance, and progress in human geography

This paper reviews recent commentary on and interpretations of the ongoing financial ‘crisis’ unfolding in many western economies. It finds that a central theme of these readings is the twofold argument that modern finance is too complex, and that this complexity is responsible for the crisis. The paper, inspired both by the economist John Galbraith and by the geographer David Harvey, argues against this widespread ascription and scapegoating of complexity. It does so as part of a wider argument that progress in human geography can be fostered through demystification of modern money and finance.

The BBC, the Creative Class, and Neoliberal Urbanism in the North of England

The author examines the BBCs plans to move some of its key activities to Salford in the northwest of England. He develops a critique not so much of the plan to move, but of the specific proposals for that move (particularly as advanced by local parties in Salford) and of the economic-geographical claims assembled around them. To make these arguments, the author first identifies parallels between the proposals and Richard Floridas ‘creative class’ formulations. He then draws on a range of critiques of the ‘creative class’ concept to contest the substance of the BBC-Salford plan—which, he argues, reproduces an entrenched neoliberal urban development agenda—and to question the premise that the move will create regional economic value more broadly. Framed against international research into creativity-led development agendas which has typically privileged metropolitan or regional actors, the author argues that, ultimately, the BBCs proposals, while locally situated, are tightly bound up with national economics and politics.

Banking spatially on the future: capital switching, infrastructure and the ecological fix

Since the onset of the global economic crisis, financiers and the institutions regulating their behavior have been subject to far-reaching criticism. At the same time, leading geo-scientists have been insisting that future environmental change might be far more profound than previously anticipated. Finance capital has long been a crucial mechanism for melting present solidities into air to create different futures. This article asks what the prospects are for the switching of credit money into green infrastructures—a switching increasingly recognized as necessary for climate change mitigation and (especially) adaptation. Most research into geographies of finance has ignored ecological questions and few contemporary society–nature researchers examine major fixed-capital investments. Unlike those geographers who criticize capitalism without offering feasible alternatives, we take a pragmatic view underpinned by democratic socioenvironmental values and attempt to identify leverage points for meaningful change. This programmatic article identifies reasons and examples to be cautiously hopeful that liquidity can be fixed in less ecologically harmful future infrastructures, thereby addressing crucial extraeconomic challenges for the century ahead.

The territorial fix Price, power and profit in the geographies of markets

The article heeds recent calls for closer attention to the geographies of markets. Speaking primarily to a rich tradition of geographical political economy, it argues that such geographies are highly material to value and profit creation and realization. In developing this argument, the article invokes the concept of a ‘territorial fix’, whereby territory is conceptualized as a technology of market-making geared to putting in place and optimizing the conditions for capital accumulation. The article draws selectively and critically on studies of territorialized market formation and pricing in two globalized industries – pharmaceuticals and television – to formulate this argument.