Download or read book The Currency of Politics written by Stefan Eich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Money in the history of political thought, from ancient Greece to the Great Inflation of the 1970s In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, critical attention has shifted from the economy to the most fundamental feature of all market economies—money. Yet despite the centrality of political struggles over money, it remains difficult to articulate its democratic possibilities and limits. The Currency of Politics takes readers from ancient Greece to today to provide an intellectual history of money, drawing on the insights of key political philosophers to show how money is not just a medium of exchange but also a central institution of political rule. Money appears to be beyond the reach of democratic politics, but this appearance—like so much about money—is deceptive. Even when the politics of money is impossible to ignore, its proper democratic role can be difficult to discern. Stefan Eich examines six crucial episodes of monetary crisis, recovering the neglected political theories of money in the thought of such figures as Aristotle, John Locke, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He shows how these layers of crisis have come to define the way we look at money, and argues that informed public debate about money requires a better appreciation of the diverse political struggles over its meaning. Recovering foundational ideas at the intersection of monetary rule and democratic politics, The Currency of Politics explains why only through greater awareness of the historical limits of monetary politics can we begin to articulate more democratic conceptions of money.

Download or read book The Politics of Money written by Gregory Mannarino and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A warning: never before in recorded history has humankind faced a crisis like the one which lies directly in our path. An unstoppable cataclysmic fiscal event is rapidly approaching which is going to wipe out a large portion of the world's population. Make no mistake about it, those holding positions at the highest levels of government are well aware that a monster is coming our way-but there is a paradox. Although this single event is going to leave the vast majority who survive desperate and destitute, never before has there been a greater opportunity for those with little or no net worth to become massively wealthy. It is at times like this where fortunes (and lives) are lost, and also made. This book illuminates the dark forces at work behind the guise of governance and the clandestine multi-billion dollar trades on Wall Street.

Download or read book Hot Money and the Politics of Debt written by R.T. Naylor and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2004-08-17 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ball of hot money rolls around the world. It seeks anonymity and political refuge. It dodges taxes and sidesteps currency controls. It rolls through offshore shell companies and secret bank accounts, phoney charities and fraudulent religious foundations. It is kept rolling by white-collar criminals, gun-runners, drug dealers, insurgent groups, scam artists, tax evaders, gold and gem smugglers, and, not least, secret service agents plotting coups and financing revolutions. R.T. Naylor explains the origins of this pool of hot and homeless money, its origins, its uses and abuses, how the world of high finance, corporate and governmental, became hostage to it, and the price the world is paying and will continue to pay until the hostages are released. This book was one of the first, and remains the most comprehensive, to dissect the world of offshore finance, capital flight, money laundering, and tax evasion. Once a subject of concern principally to tax authorities and finance ministries, since the September 11, 2001 hot and homeless money has now become a central preoccupation for police forces and intelligence services around the world.

Download or read book Currency Politics written by Jeffry A. Frieden and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-28 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics surrounding exchange rate policies in the global economy The exchange rate is the most important price in any economy, since it affects all other prices. Exchange rates are set, either directly or indirectly, by government policy. Exchange rates are also central to the global economy, for they profoundly influence all international economic activity. Despite the critical role of exchange rate policy, there are few definitive explanations of why governments choose the currency policies they do. Filled with in-depth cases and examples, Currency Politics presents a comprehensive analysis of the politics surrounding exchange rates. Identifying the motivations for currency policy preferences on the part of industries seeking to influence politicians, Jeffry Frieden shows how each industry's characteristics—including its exposure to currency risk and the price effects of exchange rate movements—determine those preferences. Frieden evaluates the accuracy of his theoretical arguments in a variety of historical and geographical settings: he looks at the politics of the gold standard, particularly in the United States, and he examines the political economy of European monetary integration. He also analyzes the politics of Latin American currency policy over the past forty years, and focuses on the daunting currency crises that have frequently debilitated Latin American nations, including Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. With an ambitious mix of narrative and statistical investigation, Currency Politics clarifies the political and economic determinants of exchange rate policies.

Download or read book Follow the Money written by Sarah Reckhow and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Furthermore, the sustainability of reform policies is closely linked to the political fortunes of the current mayor and his chosen school leader. While the media has highlighted the efforts of drastic reformers and dominating leaders such as Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., a slower, but possibly more transformative, set of reforms have been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control. Reckhow's study of Los Angeles's education system shows how democratically responsive urban school reform could occur-pairing foundation investment with broad grassroots involvement. Bringing a sharp analytical eye and a wealth of evidence to one of the most politicized issues of our day, Follow the Money will reshape our thinking about educational reform in America.

Download or read book Global Capital National State and the Politics of Money written by Werner Bonefeld and published by Springer. This book was released on 1994-12-12 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of international debt have received increasing attention in recent years. However, discussion of the politics of money has focused on Latin American and 'third' world countries. So far there has been little treatment of the politics of scarce money and of money as a political category in relation to 'advanced' countries. The central theme of the book is the limitations and constraints on state action which arise from the relation between the (nation) state and the global flow of money.

Download or read book Theology of Money written by Philip Goodchild and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-22 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theology of Money is a philosophical inquiry into the nature and role of money in the contemporary world. Philip Goodchild reveals the significance of money as a dynamic social force by arguing that under its influence, moral evaluation is subordinated to economic valuation, which is essentially abstract and anarchic. His rigorous inquiry opens into a complex analysis of political economy, encompassing markets and capital, banks and the state, class divisions, accounting practices, and the ecological crisis awaiting capitalism. Engaging with Christian theology and the thought of Carl Schmitt, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, and many others, Goodchild develops a theology of money based on four contentions, which he elaborates in depth. First, money has no intrinsic value; it is a promise of value, a crystallization of future hopes. Second, money is the supreme value in contemporary society. Third, the value of assets measured by money is always future-oriented, dependent on expectations about how much might be obtained for those assets at a later date. Since this value, when realized, will again depend on future expectations, the future is forever deferred. Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust, or credit. Fourth, money is created as debt, which involves a social obligation to work or make profits to repay the loan. As a system of debts, money imposes an immense and irresistible system of social control on individuals, corporations, and governments, each of whom are threatened by economic failure if they refuse their obligations to the money system. This system of debt has progressively tightened its hold on all sectors and regions of global society. With Theology of Money, Goodchild aims to make conscious our collective faith and its dire implications.

Download or read book The Great Wall of Money written by Eric Helleiner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an economic superpower, China has become an increasingly important player in the international monetary system. Its foreign exchange reserves are the largest in the world and its exchange rate policy has become a major subject of international economic diplomacy. The internationalization of the renminbi (RMB) raises critical questions in international policy circles: What kinds of power is China acquiring in international monetary relations? What are the priorities of the Chinese government? What explains its preferences? In The Great Wall of Money, a distinguished group of contributors addresses these questions from distinct perspectives, revealing the extent to which China’s choices, and global monetary affairs, will be shaped by internal political factors and affect world politics. The RMB is a likely competitor for the dollar in the next couple of decades; its emergence as an important international currency would have substantial effects on the balance of power between the United States and China. By illuminating the politics of China’s international monetary relations, this book provides a timely account of the global economy, the role of the renminbi in international relations, and the trajectory of China’s continuing ascendency in the coming decades.

Download or read book Golden Rule written by Thomas Ferguson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "To discover who rules, follow the gold." This is the argument of Golden Rule, a provocative, pungent history of modern American politics. Although the role big money plays in defining political outcomes has long been obvious to ordinary Americans, most pundits and scholars have virtually dismissed this assumption. Even in light of skyrocketing campaign costs, the belief that major financial interests primarily determine who parties nominate and where they stand on the issues—that, in effect, Democrats and Republicans are merely the left and right wings of the "Property Party"—has been ignored by most political scientists. Offering evidence ranging from the nineteenth century to the 1994 mid-term elections, Golden Rule shows that voters are "right on the money." Thomas Ferguson breaks completely with traditional voter centered accounts of party politics. In its place he outlines an "investment approach," in which powerful investors, not unorganized voters, dominate campaigns and elections. Because businesses "invest" in political parties and their candidates, changes in industrial structures—between large firms and sectors—can alter the agenda of party politics and the shape of public policy. Golden Rule presents revised versions of widely read essays in which Ferguson advanced and tested his theory, including his seminal study of the role played by capital intensive multinationals and international financiers in the New Deal. The chapter "Studies in Money Driven Politics" brings this aspect of American politics into better focus, along with other studies of Federal Reserve policy making and campaign finance in the 1936 election. Ferguson analyzes how a changing world economy and other social developments broke up the New Deal system in our own time, through careful studies of the 1988 and 1992 elections. The essay on 1992 contains an extended analysis of the emergence of the Clinton coalition and Ross Perot's dramatic independent insurgency. A postscript on the 1994 elections demonstrates the controlling impact of money on several key campaigns. This controversial work by a theorist of money and politics in the U.S. relates to issues in campaign finance reform, PACs, policymaking, public financing, and how today's elections work.

Download or read book Pay to Play Politics written by Heath Brown and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pay-to-Play Politics examines money and politics from different angles to understand a central paradox of American democracy: why, when the public and politicians decry money as the worst aspect of American politics, are there so few signs of change? Everyone from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders to Ted Cruz complains about the corrupting role of money and politics, but money is the lifeblood of their political survival. The public, too, deplores big money politics, despite regularly reelecting the richest candidates for office. The purpose of this book is to reconcile how—against many people's wishes—the connection between money and politics has come to define American democracy. Examining the issue from the perspective of the public, the courts, big business, Congress, and the presidency, Heath Brown argues that money can often be harmful to the political process, but not always in ways we expect or in ways we can directly observe. More money does not necessarily guarantee electoral, legislative, or executive victories, but money does greatly change political access, opportunity, and trust. Without a nuanced understanding of the nature of the problem, future reforms will be misguided and fruitless. Pay-to-Play Politics concludes by making concrete recommendations for reform, including feasible ways to reach bipartisan consensus.

Download or read book The Power of Money written by Henry L. Bretton and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1980-01-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Money is both a vibrant, dynamic material substance and a social force that permeates industrial societies in their entirety. Yet significant aspects of how money works in society are concealed by myths, dogmas, and misperceptions. In The Power of Money Henry Bretton focuses on how money works in a democracy. He contends that the well-being of political democracy depends on a fuller understanding of the centrality of money in politics, and he presents his ideas on monetary policy, corruption and reform, banking and politics, private power within a democracy, money in international relations, and the system-destroying effects of money. Bretton considers the subject of money and democracy in the context of how monetarization of societies proceeded form antiquity to the Industrial Revolution, and he analyzes the formative years of the United States in terms of being based on political ideas that did not take account of monetarization. He reviews what social theorists and economists from Aristotle to Friedman have thought about the role of money in society and how it affects individual behavior and social norms. The link between economics and politics has been only partially explored, he contends, and he sees the major task for social scientists as developing a fuller integration of the two mainstreams of social theory, the political and the economic.

Download or read book Killer Politics written by Ed Schultz and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2010-05-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The middle class, where the greatness of this nation is rooted, is under siege by an increasingly unethical system, managed by economic vampires who are sucking the lifeblood out of the American family and ripping the heart out of democracy itself. Big money-and the politicians who are swayed by it-play both parties against each other, using this false battle to distract most of us from the real war, which is a war against the American family. This is it, folks . . . the moment of truth. This will be the moment historians will look back upon and either say it was the moment this great ship of state corrected its course, or the moment it sailed completely away from its democratic ideals. To succeed, we have to reach back and rediscover our greatness. Progress may not come as fast as we, in our impatience and impertinence, demand. But if we are patient and persistent, it will come. All good things in life require a heavy lift, so roll up your sleeves. We are not done yet. --from Killer Politics According to a 2008 Pew Report, more than half of all Americans self-identify as middle class -- but the actual number of Americans with middle-class incomes is declining. The middle class is going away. As increasing numbers of Americans are faced with obstacles to education, health care, jobs, and equity, the middle class as a financial bracket is being replaced by the middle class as little more than a state of mind. The richest Americans are growing exponentially wealthier, while the rest of us struggle to bear the financial and emotional burdens of an increasingly broken system. In Killer Politics, Ed Schultz pulls the wool back from our eyes, shows us what the state of the middle class really is, and gives us the tools we need to fight back.

Download or read book The Ontology and Function of Money written by Leonidas Zelmanovitz and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-12-24 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central thesis of the book is that in order to evaluate monetary policy, one should have a clear idea about the characteristics and functions of money as it evolved and in its current form. That is to say that without an understanding about how money evolved as a social institution, what it is today, and what is possible to know about monetary phenomena, it is not possible to develop a meaningful ethics for money; or, to put it differently, to find what kind of institutional arrangements may be deemed good money for the kind of society we are in. And without that, one faces severe limitations in offering a normative position about monetary policy. The project is, consequently, an interdisciplinary one. Its main thread is an inquiry of moral philosophy and its foundations, as applied to money, in order to create tools to evaluate public policy in regard to money, banking, and public finance; and the views of different schools on those topics are discussed. The book is organized in parts on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and politics of money to facilitate the presentation of all the subjects discussed to an educated readership (and not necessarily just one with a background in economics).

Download or read book Declarations of Dependence written by Scott Ferguson and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2018-07-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique after modern monetary theory -- Transcending the aesthetic -- Declarations of dependence -- Medium congruentissimum -- Allegories of the aesthetic -- Becoming second nature

Download or read book The Politics of Property Rights written by Stephen Haber and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-05-26 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses a puzzle in political economy: why is it that political instability does not necessarily translate into economic stagnation or collapse? In order to address this puzzle, it advances a theory about property rights systems in many less developed countries. In this theory, governments do not have to enforce property rights as a public good. Instead, they may enforce property rights selectively (as a private good), and share the resulting rents with the group of asset holders who are integrated into the government. Focusing on Mexico, this book explains how the property rights system was constructed during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876-1911) and then explores how this property rights system either survived, or was reconstructed. The result is an analytic economic history of Mexico under both stability and instability, and a generalizable framework about the interaction of political and economic institutions.

Download or read book Bad Money written by Kevin Phillips and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his acclaimed book American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the spiking cost (and growing scarcity) of oil- warnings that are proving to be frighteningly accurate. Now, in his most significant and timely book yet, Phillips takes the full measure of this crisis. They are a part of what he calls "bad money"- not just the depreciated dollar, but also the dangerous attitudes and the flawed products of wayward mega-finance. His devastating conclusion: In its hubris, the financial sector has hijacked the American economy and put our very global future at risk-and it may be too late to stop it.

Download or read book Money Rules written by Henry Laurence and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Henry Laurence traces financial market reform in Britain and Japan over the last two decades, charting the movement of the Anglo-Saxon and Japanese styles of capitalism toward a new, hybrid form of economic organization. He explains what these two stories reveal about changes in the nature of business-government relations in an age of convergence.The package of reforms known in Britain as the "Big Bang" and in Japan as "Biggu Bangu" decontrolled prices, liberalized the number and nature of financial instruments that could be traded, opened both countries' markets to foreigners, and introduced a much greater degree of competition than would have been believed possible twenty years earlier. At the same time, Britain and Japan have undertaken stringent measures to improve the transparency and fairness of their markets.Why did two countries with traditionally very different regulatory styles adopt such strikingly similar reforms, and why did these reforms result in a mixture of deregulation in some areas and tighter control in others? In explaining these apparent contradictions, Laurence invokes the powerful domestic political impact of international capital mobility.Money Rules challenges the view that bureaucracy is the most powerful actor in the policymaking process. Using extensive interviews with more than one hundred policymakers and financial professionals in both countries, the author rebuts conventional wisdom. He argues that the events in Britain and Japan demonstrate striking crossnational convergence of political and economic institutions.