Martijn Konings

Geographies of Financialization in Disarray: The Dutch Case in Comparative Perspective

Abstract The securitization crisis that started in mid-2007 has demonstrated that we are indeed living in a “global financial village” and are all subject to the vagaries of financialization. Nevertheless, the fallout from the credit crisis has not been homogeneous across space. That some localities were hit harder than others suggests that there are distinct geographies of financialization. Combining insights from the “varieties of capitalism” literature with those from the literature on “financialization studies,” the article offers a first take on what may explain these different geographies on the basis of an informal comparison of the trajectories of financialization and their political repercussions in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands. The article ends with some reflections on how economic geography could be enriched by combining comparative studies on institutionalism and financialization, while its distinct research focus—detailed spatial analysis endowed with a well-developed sensitivity for geographic variegation—may help overcome the methodological nationalism of much comparative institutionalism.

American empire and the political economy of global finance

Preface Introduction L.Panitch & M.Konings PART I: CONTOURS AND SOURCES OF IMPERIAL FINANCE Finance and American Empire L.Panitch & S.Gindin American Finance and Empire in Historical Perspective M.Konings PART II: CONSTRUCTING THE PILLARS OF IMPERIAL FINANCE US Structural Power and the Internationalization of the US Treasury D.Sarai Neo-Liberalism and the Federal Reserve E.Newstadt US Power and the International Bond Market: Financial Flows and the Construction of Risk Value S.Aquanno Towards the Americanization of European Finance? The Case of Finance-Led Accumulation in Germany T.Sablowski Accounting for Financial Capital. American Hegemony and the Conflict over International Accounting Standards T.Sablowski From Bretton Woods to Neoliberal Reforms: The International Financial Institutions and American Power R.Felder The Role of Financial Discipline in Imperial Strategy C.Rude Conclusion M.Konings & L.Panitch

The institutional foundations of US structural power in international finance: From the re-emergence of global finance to the monetarist turn

ABSTRACT This essay argues that existing interpretations of US structural power in international finance do not pay sufficient attention to its institutional basis and specifities. It reviews some of the contributions to the literature and offers an account of the re-emergence of global finance during the 1960s to the monetarist turn and its aftermath. The conclusion offers some thoughts on the implications of the analysis for our understanding of US financial power in the current era.

Rethinking Neoliberalism and the Subprime Crisis: Beyond the Re-regulation Agenda

Many critical commentators view the current crisis and the attendant legitimacy problems for free-market capitalism as an opportunity to make the case for financial re-regulation, i.e. a reassertion of public values against globalising markets. This paper suggests that such assessments of the political possibilities offered by the subprime crisis rest on a misappraisal of its nature and, more broadly, the nature of the neoliberal era. It argues that the financial expansion of the past decades cannot be adequately understood in terms of the states failure to regulate financial markets. Financial growth has not involved the retreat of public institutions, the dissolution of social bonds or an emptying out of subjectivity, but has rather been a process whereby new organisational linkages were forged, particular norms and relations of institutional control were constructed and complex identities with thoroughly interlinked emotional households were created. Through a historical interpretation of the development of American finance since the New Deal, the paper outlines how the reconfigurations of neoliberalism have not reduced but enhanced the institutional capacities of the American state, as well as the leverage and power resources available to those who enjoy privileged access to the states organisational mechanisms. It then returns to the question of the political significance of the current crisis, suggesting that to seize on the change in ideological climate to advocate increased state control over financial life is likely to come down to supporting the restoration and fortification of an infrastructure of financial power that we criticised when it still went under the ideological banner of neoliberalism.

European finance in the American mirror: financial change and the reconfiguration of competitiveness

This article examines the implications of financialisation for the conceptual status of, and the relationship between, the continental European and Anglo-American financial systems. After a theoretical discussion of the issue of institutional variety and convergence, the essay outlines the trajectory of financialisation processes from their American origins to the UK and continental Europe. It emphasizes that in key respects Anglo-American capitalism is a more rather than less ‘embedded’ model of finance and reinterprets the transition to neoliberalism in this light. It proceeds to unpack the concept of financialisation and present an approach that conceptualizes institutional variety not by opposing national systems to globalizing financial markets, but precisely by locating them within that process. The essay then takes a closer look at the reconfiguration of financial competitiveness since the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The conclusion offers some thoughts on the implications of the analysis for the present situation.

The construction of US financial power

Critical work in international political economy (IPE) has sought to theorise US financial power through the concept of structural power, intended as a means to go beyond state-centric conceptions of political power and to trace the states interaction with socio economic forces. But due to the tendency to ontologise the distinction between state and market, IPE has not been fully successful in articulating the linkages between structural power and state power. The article then examines literature in the field of cultural political economy (CPE), which emphasises the constitutive importance of the cultural norms and practices situated at the level of everyday life. The CPE literature fails to challenge established IPE accounts in some key respects, and the article relates this to its conception of political power. The article develops an institution-based perspective that is more suitable to theorising the linkages between structural power and state power, and then proceeds to develop an interpretation of the construction of American financial power over the course of the 20th century. It reinterprets some of the key moments in the history of US and global finance and re-examines notions of American financial decline.

Neoliberalism and the American State

This essay argues that neoliberalism was a return to classical, laissez-faire liberalism only on an ideological level, and that neoliberal practices were never so much about subordinating public and private actors to disembedded markets as about enhancing the American state’s infrastructural control over financial life and advancing the capacities of those actors who enjoy privileged access to its organizational mechanisms. The neoliberal era is analysed as a process of institutionalization whereby financial forms penetrated more deeply into everyday life, innovation assumed a certain systemic coherence, and authorities created more effective policy instruments. The essay concludes that the American state’s intervention in the current conjuncture (i.e. in the aftermath of the subprime crisis) should not primarily be seen as a breakdown of neoliberalism but rather as the state wielding political capacities constructed over the course of the neoliberal era.

Governing the system: Risk, finance, and neoliberal reason

The 2007/2008 financial crisis was widely expected to usher in a shift toward a post-neoliberal regime that would be more actively concerned with system-level risk and impose restrictive regulations on financial institutions and markets. Such a shift, it is now widely recognized, has failed to materialize. Commentators have tended to point to the “capture” of policymaking processes by financial elites to account for the failure of reform. This argument represents the continuation of a problematic trend in critical perspectives on neoliberalism — namely, to rely on an instrumentalist understanding of institutional power and to view the survival of neoliberalism as dependent on external interventions. That line of critique, it is argued, is rather one-sided in downplaying the internal sources of cohesion that neoliberalism commands. Taking its cue from Foucault’s comments on neoliberalism in his late lectures at the Collège de France and the methodological innovations that he introduced in that context, the article explores the logic of governance through risk and the specific way in which neoliberalism intervenes in this relationship. In this way, it moves beyond an understanding of neoliberalism that views it in terms of the neglect of system-level governance and offers an account of the distinctive modalities of neoliberal financial governance. The article suggests that we should not view developments since the crisis in purely negative terms (the failure of progressive reform), but consider the ways in which they represent a continuation of the distinctive rationality of neoliberal financial governance.

US Financial Power in Crisis

This essay examines the questions raised by the present financial crisis through an enquiry into the institutional foundations of American finance. We view with some scepticism strong claims concerning the disastrous outcome for the structural dynamism of the global financial system and Americas position in it. Many critical political economists tend to take the system of global financial markets as their point of departure and then locate the US in this system. Such approaches, however, generally fail to do justice to the decades-long build up of US financial power and do not capture many of the organic institutional linkages through which the American state is connected to the world of global finance and which are responsible for its imperial sprawl. In many ways, financial globalisation is not best understood as the re-emergence of international finance but, rather, as a process through which the expansionary dynamics of American finance took on global dimensions. Because the present system of global finance has been shaped so profoundly by specifically American institutions and practices, it will not do to evaluate the changes and transformations of this system on the basis of either an abstract, generic model of capitalism or mere extrapolations from conjunctural crises. Crisis and instability are part and parcel of the dynamics of imperial finance and so are the managerial capacities developed by the US state. The most important questions that should occupy critical political economists therefore have to do not with what appear to be external challenges to US financial power (or the putative opportunities for progressive change opened up by them), but, rather, relate to the ways in which the imperial network of intricate, complex and often opaque institutional linkages between the US state and global finance is managed and reproduced.

Imagined Double Movements: Progressive Thought and the Specter of Neoliberal Populism

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the American Tea Party movement has played a prominent role in forcing a return to neoliberalism. Progressive treatments of this development have been rather dismissive: seen through a lens that emphasizes the inherent tension between capitalism and democracy, neoliberal populism can only appear as an incongruous phenomenon. The article suggests that such assessments reflect an insufficiently developed understanding of the moral force and affective charge of neoliberal discourses and their ability to shape popular democratic sentiment. It considers the political significance of this by examining progressivisms conceptual logic and the way it has distanced itself from popular concerns and affects. The article concludes that the modern progressive political imaginary participates in the making of political realities that elude its grasp, unreflexively fueling the very kind of neoliberal populism that it ignores or dismisses. Después de la crisis financiera, el movimiento del partido American Tea Party, ha jugado un papel destacado en forzar un retorno al neoliberalismo. Los tratamientos progresivos de este desarrollo han sido más bien desdeñosos: visto a través de lentes que enfatizan la tensión inherente entre el capitalismo y la democracia, el populismo neoliberal puede solamente aparecer como un fenómeno incongruente. El artículo sugiere que tales evaluaciones reflejan un insuficiente conocimiento desarrollado de la fuerza moral y cargo afectivo de los discursos neoliberales y su habilidad para forjar el sentimiento democrático. Considera el significado político de esto mediante la examinación de la lógica conceptual del progresismo y la forma como se ha distanciado de las preocupaciones y repercusiones populares. El artículo concluye que el imaginario político progresivo moderno participa en la elaboración de realidades políticas que eluden su control, alimentando inconscientemente un populismo neoliberal que ignora o descarta. 作为金融危机的结果，美国茶党运动在催迫向新自由主义回归方面扮演了重要角色。进步派对待这一发展是相当轻蔑的：通过强调资本主义和民主之间内在紧张之棱镜，新自由民粹主义只能以一种不调和的现象出现。本文表明，这些评估反映了一种发展不足的对新自由主义话语之道德力量和情感蕴藏，以及它们塑造民众民主情感的能力的理解。文章通过进步主义的概念逻辑及与民众关注和情感保持距离，考虑了上述现象的政治意义。本文的结论是，现代进步主义的政治想象参与到了躲避其掌控的政治现实的形成之中，缺乏自省地为它所忽视或不屑一顾的那种新自由民粹主义火上浇油。 금융위기 이후 미국의 티파티 운동은 신자유주의로 돌아갈 것을 강요하는데 중요한 역할을 하고 있다.티파티 운동의 발전에 대한 진보적인 설명이 다소 등한시되었다. 자본주의와 민주주의 간의 내적인 긴장을 강조하는 관점을 통해서 신자유주의적 포퓰리즘이 단지 앞뒤가 맞지 않는 현상으로만 보여질 수 있다. 이 글은 그러한 평가는 신자유주의적 담론의 도덕적 힘과 감정적 비난 그리고 대중적 민주적 감정에 영향을 미칠 수 있는 능력에 대한 불충분한 이해를 반영한다는 것을 제시한다. 진보주의의 개념적 논리와 대중적 관심과 감성으로부터 스스로를 멀리하는 방식을 검토함으로써 이것의 정치적 의미를 다룬다. 이 글은 현대 진보적 정치적 상상력이 무시하거나 놓치고 있는 일종의 신자유주의 포률리즘을 비성찰적으로 부채질하면서 본질을 파악하기에 어려운 정치적 현실을 만드는데 참여하고 있다고 결론 내린다.