Download or read book Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis written by Ismael Hossein-zadeh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-16 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a critique of the neoclassical explanations of the 2008 financial collapse, of the ensuing long recession and of the neoliberal austerity responses to it. The study argues that while the prevailing views of deregulation and financialization as instrumental culprits in the explosion and implosion of the financial bubble are not false, they fail to point out that financialization is essentially an indication of an advanced stage of capitalist development. These standard explanations tend to ignore the systemic dynamics of the accumulation of finance capital, the inherent limits to that accumulation, production and division of economic surplus, class relations, and the balance of social forces that mold economic policy. Instead of simply blaming the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players, as neoliberals do, or lax public supervision, as Keynesians do, this book focuses on the core dynamics of capitalist development that not only created the financial bubble, but also fostered the ‘irrational behavior’ of market players and subverted public policy. Due to its interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in economics, finance, politics and sociology.

Download or read book The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report written by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and published by Cosimo, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 692 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, published by the U.S. Government and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in early 2011, is the official government report on the United States financial collapse and the review of major financial institutions that bankrupted and failed, or would have without help from the government. The commission and the report were implemented after Congress passed an act in 2009 to review and prevent fraudulent activity. The report details, among other things, the periods before, during, and after the crisis, what led up to it, and analyses of subprime mortgage lending, credit expansion and banking policies, the collapse of companies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the federal bailouts of Lehman and AIG. It also discusses the aftermath of the fallout and our current state. This report should be of interest to anyone concerned about the financial situation in the U.S. and around the world.THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION is an independent, bi-partisan, government-appointed panel of 10 people that was created to "examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States." It was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009. The commission consisted of private citizens with expertise in economics and finance, banking, housing, market regulation, and consumer protection. They examined and reported on "the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government."News Dissector DANNY SCHECHTER is a journalist, blogger and filmmaker. He has been reporting on economic crises since the 1980's when he was with ABC News. His film In Debt We Trust warned of the economic meltdown in 2006. He has since written three books on the subject including Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books, 2008), and The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big to Jail (Disinfo Books, 2011), a companion to his latest film Plunder The Crime Of Our Time. He can be reached online at www.newsdissector.com.

Download or read book Structural Analysis and the Process of Economic Development written by Jonas Ljungberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economic development is full of discontinuities. Mainstream economists perceive these as external disturbances to a natural state of equilibrium, but this book argues that much of the discontinuities are part of economic development, suggesting that patterns can be understood with structural analysis. Structural Analysis and the Process of Economic Development presents a detailed analysis of the trajectory of Swedish economic change since the nineteenth century. The emergence of structural analysis in economic research is reviewed, as well as a chapter devoted to development blocks, a key concept that was outlined in the 1940s and that has much in common with the more recent notions ‘techno-economic paradigms’ and ‘general-purpose technologies’. Structural analysis and the major contributions by Schön are introduced in this book. Also highlighted is Sweden’s integration into the international economy via the nineteenth century capital markets, along with structural analysis as a tool for understanding climate change. The recent technique of wavelet analysis and its potential for structural analysis is demonstrated in a non-technical chapter. This book is suitable for those who are interested in and study political economy, economic history and European history.

Download or read book Macroeconomics After the Financial Crisis written by Mogens Ove Madsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How should Europe cope with the negative and still unfolding economic consequences of the current economic crisis? And why does Europe seem to be more conservative than the USA in dealing with the crisis? Since the outbreak of the current international economic crisis in 2008, the USA and many of the European countries have been tormented by high levels of unemployment and low levels of inflation, interest rates close to zero and fiscal policies of austerity. As such, the modern economic mainstream has been challenged by these empirical facts. Today, several years after the outbreak of the international economic crisis, supply side effects do not seem to be increasing employment as the modern mainstream claimed they would. Aggregate demand has to play a more important role in macroeconomic analysis than hitherto. That is, there is a need for alternative explanations of how a modern macro economy is expected to function and how the macroeconomic outcome could be manipulated by the right economic policy proposals. As expressed by the contents of the present book, a Post Keynesian understanding proposes such an alternative theoretically, methodologically and in terms of policy measures. This book will present new materials and approaches, especially new evidence and new views on the potential problems of public debt, the European Union and the present crisis, Central Banking, hysteresis in an agent based framework, the foundations of macroeconomics and the problems of uncertainty.

Download or read book The Future of Capitalism After the Financial Crisis written by Richard Westra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of Capitalism After the Financial Crisis: The Varieties of Capitalism Debate in the Age of Austerity contains thirteen world leading political economists writing from within eight different countries who critically analyze the current crisis tendencies of capitalism both globally and in particular countries. Given the likelihood of an increasingly crisis prone future for capitalism, it is important not only to rethink capitalism in its current manifestations or varieties. It is also important to rethink research methods and conceptual frameworks in preparation for understanding an increasingly rocky future in which capitalism itself could go the way of the many species that in the past were endangered only to become extinct. More and more titles of books and articles are suggesting that capitalism or perhaps civilization itself is endangered if we do not make radical changes in the near future. This book breaks with academic path dependency and attempts to open new vistas of political economy and of multidisciplinary analysis that are crucially important if our thought processes are to be effective in a world in jeopardy. The varieties of capitalism (VoC) debate itself came into being as the Soviet Union unraveled. It drew in scholarship from a cross-section of Marxian and heterodox political economy. The key argument of VoC was that if capitalism was the only global option then those on the Left must get involved in policy discussions on how capitalist economies can be fashioned to become competitive as well as progressive. However, the financial crisis has seen policy across the advanced economies veer toward competitiveness coupled with austerity. The lesson for the Left is that alternatives to capitalism must be sought in the here and now.

Download or read book Discourse Analysis and Austerity written by Kate Power and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-04 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, governments around the developed world coordinated policy moves to stimulate economic activity and avert a depression. In subsequent years, however, cuts to public expenditure, or austerity, have become the dominant narrative in public debate on economic policy. This unique collaboration between economists and linguists examines manifestations of the discourses of austerity as these have played out in media, policy and academic settings across Europe and the Americas. Adopting a critical perspective, it seeks to elucidate the discursive and argumentation strategies used to consolidate austerity as the dominant economic policy narrative of the twenty-first century.

Download or read book The Systemic Nature of the Economic Crisis written by Arturo Hermann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most prominent aspect of the current financial crisis is its systemic character which manifests itself in high levels of inequality, rampant unemployment, economic and social insecurity and environmental decay. This book explores the potential of a pluralistic and interdisciplinary approach for a deeper understanding of the manifold aspects of the economic crisis. This book examines the potential of a number of contributions from heterodox economics and psychoanalysis in providing a deeper understanding of these problems. The book analyses some of the most debated aspects of the concepts of market, democracy and socialism and explores the role of structural ties between economic, social and psychological aspects of collective life. It also addresses the main economic aspects of the crisis and pays particular attention to a number of structural imbalances, and to the psychological interpretation of these phenomena. By drawing together approaches from heterodox economics and psychoanalysis, this book adopts a pluralist and interdisciplinary approach to the study of these phenomena and manages to overcome the fragmentation so often present in social sciences.

Download or read book Finance Accumulation and Monetary Power written by Daniel Woodley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This accessible yet rigorous book examines the development of ‘financial socialism’ in advanced capitalist economies in the decade since the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. This new term refers to an attempt to resolve the accumulation crisis of capital through coordinated central bank activism, where state circuits of monetary capital assume a critical role in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The book explains the dynamics of the crisis as it has developed and assesses the response of monetary elites to systemic financial risk in the global economy. Their failure to re-engineer growth following the technology boom of the late 1990s and the global financial crisis are driving fundamental changes in the form and function of capitalist money, which have yet to be theorized adequately. Finance, Accumulation and Monetary Power presents a revealing and radical critique of the failure of the International Political Economy to apprehend changes taking place within capitalism, employing a critical-theoretical analysis of contradictions in the capitalist reproduction scheme. The book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of international political economy, critical political economy, heterodox economics, globalization, international relations, international political sociology, business studies and finance.

Download or read book The Political Economy and Media Coverage of the European Economic Crisis written by Julien Mercille and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-27 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The European economic crisis has been ongoing since 2008 and while austerity has spread over the continent, it has failed to revive economies. The media have played an important ideological role in presenting the policies of economic and political elites in a favourable light, even if the latter’s aim has been to shift the burden of adjustment onto citizens. This book explains how and why, using a critical political economic perspective and focusing on the case of Ireland. Throughout, Ireland is compared with contemporary and historical examples to contextualise the arguments made. The book covers the housing bubble that led to the crash, the rescue of financial institutions by the state, the role of the European institutions and the International Monetary Fund, austerity, and the possibility of leaving the eurozone for Europe’s peripheral countries. Through a systematic analysis of Ireland’s main newspapers, it is argued that the media reflect elite views and interests and downplay alternative policies that could lead to more progressive responses to the crisis.

Download or read book Financial Cultures and Crisis Dynamics written by Bob Jessop and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The recent financial crisis exposed both a naïve faith in mathematical models to manage risk and a crude culture of greed that embraces risk. This book explores cultures of finance in sites such as corporate governance, hedge funds, central banks, the City of London and Wall Street, and small and medium enterprises. It uses different methods to explore these cultures and their interaction with different financial orders to improve our understanding of financial crisis dynamics. The introduction identifies types of cultural turn in studies of finance. Part I outlines relevant research methods, including comparison of national cultures viewed as independent variables, cultural political economy, and critical discourse and narrative policy analysis. Part II examines different institutional cultures of finance and the cult of entrepreneurship. Part III offers historical, comparative, and contemporary analyses of financial regimes and their significance for crisis dynamics. Part IV explores organizational cultures, modes of calculation, and financial practices and how they shape economic performance and guide crisis management. Part V considers crisis construals and responses in the European Union and China. This book’s great strength is its multi-faceted approach to cultures of finance. Contributors deploy the cultural turn creatively to enhance comparative and historical analysis of financial regimes, institutions, organizations, and practices as well as their roles in crisis generation, construal, and management. Developing different paradigms and methods and elaborating diverse case studies, the authors illustrate not only how and why ‘culture matters’ but also how its significance is shaped by different financial regimes and contexts.

Download or read book Greek Capitalism in Crisis written by Stavros Mavroudeas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the depth of the Greek crisis, the exorbitant burdens placed upon the working people and the massive popular resistance movement to capitalist policies, there is a definite lack of consistently Marxist analyses of the Greek problem. International debates regarding the Greek crisis have been dominated by orthodox (Neoclassical and neo-Keynesian) approaches. The heterodox side of these debates has been occupied by Radical Political Economy approaches (usually radical post-Keynesian or Marxo-Keynesian perspectives). Moreover, they are dominated by the ‘financialisation’ thesis which is quite alien to Marxism, neglects the sphere of production and professes that the global crisis is simply a financial crisis that has nothing to do with ‘real’ accumulation and the profit rate. This book argues that by emphasising the sphere of production and profitability, classical Marxist analysis better explains the Greek crisis than its orthodox and heterodox competitors. The contributors present critiques of the prevalent approaches and offer studies of the Greek crisis that use the methodology and the analytical and empirical tools of classical Marxist Political Economy. In particular, it is shown that the Greek crisis was caused by falling profitability and the ensuing overaccumulation crisis. The ‘broad unequal exchange’ existing between the euro-center and the euro-periphery contributed to Greek capital’s falling profitability. This book enriches the debate about the Greek economic crisis by demonstrating the insights that can be drawn by considering the Marxist alternative to the dominant mainstream and heterodox approaches.

Download or read book The Political Economy of Food and Finance written by Ted P. Schmidt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The financialization, globalization and industrialization of our food systems make it increasingly difficult to access quality fresh food. In fact, the industrialized global food system is creating products that are less food-like, engendering growing questions about the health and safety of our food supply. In addition, the bio-engineering of food commodities is another factor influencing the growth of industrial farming for an increasingly homogenized, globalized market. This book describes the financialization process in commodity futures markets which transformed commodities into an asset class. Incorporated into the portfolio decisions of investors, commodity prices now behave like all asset prices, becoming more volatile and subject to periodic bubbles. As commodity prices were driven higher in the 2000s, farmland became more valuable, setting off a global land grab by investors, nations, and corporations. More recently, under the financialization food regime, slow growth and low returns encouraged merger activity driven by private equity firms, with food industry corporations as prime targets, leading to increased industry concentration. With government policy focused on supporting corporate interests, there has been a global reaction to the current food system. The food sovereignty movement is taking on the interests behind the global land grab, and the regional food movement in cities across the U.S. is hitting corporations at the bottom line. Food corporations are listening. Is the food movement winning? This book is of interest to those who study political economy, financialization and agriculture and related studies, as well as food systems and commodity future markets.

Download or read book Of Synthetic Finance written by Benjamin Lozano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthetic finance revolutionizes materialism such that we can now create wealth in the process of universally distributing it. While financial innovation in global capitalism provided the conditions for the 2008 financial crisis, it has also engineered a set of financial technologies with universal distributive potential. This book explains this possibility and demonstrates how it can be achieved through a rigorous ontological exposition of the radical, nomadic, distributive power of synthetic finance. It also illustrates that Gilles Deleuze is the heterodox political economist who best reveals its profound material capacities. This book articulates an innovative method for the study of finance, fundamentally revaluates political economy as a discipline and practice, and inaugurates a research project from which derivative methodologies and approaches to critical finance can evolve. Of Synthetic Finance actualizes a new kind of heterodox political economy called speculative materialism, and advocates a radical project of speculative materialist financial engineering. Both of these are predicated on the deployment of the latent, nomadic, monstrous capacities of synthetic finance to create and universally distribute risk and cash flow. This book is a must read for anyone interested in critical finance, the financial crisis and the future of political economy.

Download or read book The Evolution of Economies written by Patrick Spread and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is clear even to casual observation that economies evolve from year to year and over centuries. Yet mainstream economic theory assumes that economies always move towards equilibrium. One consequence of this is that mainstream theory is unable to deal with economic history. The Evolution of Economies provides a clear account of how economies evolve under a process of support-bargaining and money-bargaining. Both support-bargaining and money-bargaining are situation-related - people determine their interests and actions by reference to their present circumstances. This gives the bargaining system a natural evolutionary dynamic. Societies evolve from situation to situation. Historical change follows this evolutionary course. A central chapter of the book applies the new theory in a re-evaluation of the industrial revolution in Britain, showing how specialist money-bargaining agencies, in the form of companies, evolved profitable formats and displaced landowners as the leading sources of employment and economic necessities. Companies took advantage of the evolution of technology to establish effective formats. The book also seeks to establish how it came about that a ‘mainstream’ theory was developed that is so wildly at odds with the observable features of economic history and economic exchange. Theory-making is described as a process of ‘intellectual support-bargaining’ in which theory is shaped to the interests of its makers. The work of major classical and neoclassical economists is contested as incompatible with the idea of an evolving money-bargaining system. The book reviews attempts to derive an evolutionary economic theory from Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Neoclassical economic theory has had enormous influence on the governance of societies, principally through its theoretical endorsement of the benefits of ‘free markets’. An evolutionary account of economic processes should change the basis of debate. The theory presented here will be of interest immediately to all economists, whether evolutionary, heterodox or neoclassical. It will facilitate the work of economic historians, who complain that current theory gives no guidance for their historical investigations. Beyond the confines of professional theory-making, many will find it a revelatory response to questions that have hitherto gone unanswered.

Download or read book Globalization and the Critique of Political Economy written by Lucia Pradella and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nature of the contemporary global political economy and the significance of the current crisis are a matter of wide-ranging intellectual and political debate, which has contributed to a revival of interest in Marx’s critique of political economy. This book interrogates such a critique within the broader framework of the history of political economy, and offers a new appreciation of its contemporary relevance. A distinctive feature of this study is its use of the new historical critical edition of the writings of Marx and Engels (MEGA2), their partially unpublished notebooks in particular. The sheer volume of this material forces a renewed encounter with Marx. It demonstrates that the international sphere and non-European societies had an increasing importance in his research, which developed the scientific elements elaborated by Marx’s predecessors. This book questions widespread assumptions that the nation-state was the starting point for the analysis of development. It explores the international foundations of political economy, from mercantilism to Adam Smith and David Ricardo and to Hegel, and investigates how the understanding of the international political economy informs the interpretations of history to which it gave rise. The book then traces the developments of Marx’s critique of political economy from the early 1840s to Capital Volume 1 and shows that his deepening understanding of the laws of capitalist uneven and combined development allowed him to recognise the growth of a world working class. Marx’s work thus offers the necessary categories to develop an alternative to methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism grounded in a critique of political economy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of Marx’s thought and in the foundations of International Political Economy.

Download or read book The European Union and Supranational Political Economy written by Riccardo Fiorentini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The financial crisis – originated in 2008 in the United States – had a dramatic impact on the world economy. The European Union was immediately involved, but its reaction to the crisis was clearly inadequate. The misgovernment of the European economy not only put at risk the European Monetary Union, but it also caused further hindrances to the recovery of the global economy. The global financial turmoil shook deep-rooted beliefs. The doctrine of international neo-liberalism is more and more criticized. Nevertheless, the critics of neo-liberalism focus their attention on the relationship between the state and the market, as if the nation states, with their international organisations, have enough power for an effective global governance of the world economy. The model of European supranational integration, though seriously imperfect, can suggest some new way out from the crisis – even at the world level – based on a new relationship between the supranational government of the Union and the market. In this book, several academic disciplines are involved: international economics, international political economy, international law, international relations, political theory and democratic theory. Adopting such a multidisciplinary theoretical perspective, the volume tries to answer the following question: Is a more supranational Europe able to provide a better government of the EMU? Does this reform involve more European democracy?

Download or read book Capitalism and the Political Economy of Work Time written by Christoph Hermann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Maynard Keynes expected that around the year 2030 people would only work 15 hours a week. In the mid-1960s, Jean Fourastié still anticipated the introduction of the 30-hour week in the year 2000, when productivity would continue to grow at an established pace. Productivity growth slowed down somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s with the spread of new information and communication technologies. The knowledge economy, however, did not bring about a jobless future or a world without work, as some scholars had predicted. With few exceptions, work hours of full-time employees have hardly fallen in the advanced capitalist countries in the last three decades, while in a number of countries they have actually increased since the 1980s. This book takes the persistence of long work hours as starting point to investigate the relationship between capitalism and work time. It does so by discussing major theoretical schools and their explanations for the length and distribution of work hours, as well as tracing major changes in production and reproduction systems, and analyzing their consequences for work hours. Furthermore, this volume explores the struggle for shorter work hours, starting from the introduction of the ten-hour work day in the nineteenth century to the introduction of the 35-hour week in France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century. However, the book also shows how neoliberalism has eroded collective work time regulations and resulted in an increase and polarization of work hours since the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that shorter work hours not only means more free time for workers, but also reduces inequality and improves human and ecological sustainability.