The financial crash of 2008 led people all over the world to ask how far financiers are in control of our lives. To what extent does what they do with our money affect our everyday lives? This book asks whether the crisis, and subsequent use of public subsidies to help the international economy recover, was a unique event, or a symptom of a wider malaise where financiers have effectively usurped the power of governments and are running the political economy themselves. The Financialisation of Power in Africa argues that growth is not always a good thing. The development of more derivatives and faster financial exchanges are draining businesses of investment capital rather than serving to supply it; applying financial logic does not save nature or protect biodiversity and other species. This book outlines the concept of financialisation and how it has been used in various ways to explain the post-2008 crisis and global political economy. There is a particular focus on these issues in reference to Africa, which has a particular dependence on international money. It takes the perspective of the modern state, exploring how the political economy of development actually works in relation to African governance. This book is of interest to students of international development and political economy and is a key source for policy makers interested in African studies and economic development.

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.

Radical insider’s account of how the city of London really works The City, as London’s financial centre is known, is the world’s biggest international banking and foreign exchange market, shaping the development of global capital. It is also, as this groundbreaking book reveals, a crucial part of the mechanism of power in the world economy. Based on the author’s twenty years’ experience of City dealing rooms, The City is an in-depth look at world markets and revenues that exposes how this mechanism works. All big international companies—not just the banks—utilise this system, and The City shows how the operations of the City of London are critical both for British capitalism and for world finance. Tony Norfield details, with shocking and insightful research, the role of the US dollar in global trading, the network of Britishlinked tax havens, the flows of finance around the world and the system of power built upon financial securities. Why do just fifty companies now have control of a large share of world economic production? The City explains how this situation came about, examining the history of the world economy from the postwar period to the present day. If you imagine you don’t like “finance” but have no problem with the capitalist market system, think again: it turns out the two cannot be separated.

Financialising City Statecraft and Infrastructure addresses the struggles of national and local states to fund, finance and govern urban infrastructure. It develops fresh thinking on financialisation and city statecraft to explain the socially and spatially uneven mixing of managerial, entrepreneurial and financialised city governance in austerity and limited decentralisation across England. As urban infrastructure fixes for the London global city-region risk undermining national ‘rebalancing’ efforts in the UK, city statecraft in the rest of the country is having uneasily to combine speculation, risk-taking and prospective venturing with co-ordination, planning and regulation.

Capitalism has become 'financialized'. Since the 1970s, the swelling of financial markets and asset price bubbles has occurred alongside weaker underlying economic growth. Yet financialization was not a spontaneous market development - it was deeply political. States fuelled this process through policies of financial liberalization, and the British state lies at the heart of the story. Britain's radical financial liberalizations in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in creating a financialized global economic order in which the City of London emerged as a central hub. But why did the British state propel financialization? The conventional wisdom points to the lobbying power of financial elites and the strength of neoliberal ideology. However, Governing Financialization offers an alternative explanation through an in-depth exploration of declassified state archives. By examining key financial liberalizations in the 1970s and 1980s - including the notorious 'Big Bang' - this book argues that these policies were not part of an intentional scheme to create a new finance-led economic model. Instead, they were designed to address immediate governing dilemmas related to the grinding 'stagflation' crisis and its aftershocks. In this era, British governments found themselves trapped between global competitive pressures to enforce painful domestic adjustment and national political pressures to maintain existing living standards. Financial liberalization was pursued in a trial-and-error manner to navigate this dilemma. By unleashing financial markets, the state hoped to either postpone the worst effects of the crisis, or enact tough economic restructuring in an arm's-length fashion. Financialization was an accidental outcome, not an intentional result.

In the collective psyche, a financier is a capitalist. In managerial capitalism, the notion of the ‘manager’ emerged, and the role of the manager was distinct from the role of the ‘owner’. Financial capitalism is similarly underpinned by financiers who are not the holders of the financial assets they buy, sell, trade or advise upon. Finance at Work explores the world of financiers, be they finance-oriented CEOs, CFOs, financial journalists, mergers and acquisitions’ advisors or wealth managers. Part I investigates the professional trajectories of members of corporate boards and financialisation as the dissemination of financial logic outside its primary ‘iron cage’; Part II responds by studying financiers at work within financial occupations or financial operations involving external actors; while Part III pursues the issue of financial boundaries by seeking out the way financial logic crosses these boundaries. Part IV takes back the hypothesis of differentiations within finance presented in Part I, and analyses the internal boundaries of asset management, wealth management and leveraged buyout (LBO) acquisitions. This book is essential reading for researchers and academics within the field of finance who aim to understand the ‘spread of finance’ in contemporary societies.

Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Cultures of Financialization argues that, in our age of crisis, the global economy is more invested than ever in culture and the imagination. We must take the idea of 'fictitious capital' seriously as a way to understand the power of finance, and what might be done to stop it.

The first fifteen years of the 21st century have thrown into sharp relief the challenges of growth, equity, stability, and sustainability facing the world economy. In addition, they have exposed the inadequacies of mainstream economics in providing answers to these challenges. This volume gathers over 50 leading scholars from around the world to offer a forward-looking perspective of economic geography to understanding the various building blocks, relationships, and trajectories in the world economy. The perspective is at the same time grounded in theory and in the experiences of particular places. Reviewing state-of-the-art of economic geography, setting agendas, and with illustrations and empirical evidence from all over the world, the book should be an essential reference for students, researchers, as well as strategists and policy makers. Building on the success of the first edition, this volume offers a radically revised, updated, and broader approach to economic geography. With the backdrop of the global financial crisis, finance is investigated in chapters on financial stability, financial innovation, global financial networks, the global map of savings and investments, and financialization. Environmental challenges are addressed in chapters on resource economies, vulnerability of regions to climate change, carbon markets, and energy transitions. Distribution and consumption feature alongside more established topics on the firm, innovation, and work. The handbook also captures the theoretical and conceptual innovations of the last fifteen years, including evolutionary economic geography and the global production networks approach. Addressing the dangers of inequality, instability, and environmental crisis head-on, the volume concludes with strategies for growth and new ways of envisioning the spatiality of economy for the future.

Financialization has become the go-to term for scholars grappling with the growth of finance. This Handbook offers the first comprehensive survey of the scholarship on financialization, connecting finance with changes in politics, technology, culture, society and the economy. It takes stock of the diverse avenues of research that comprise financialization studies and the contributions they have made to understanding the changes in contemporary societies driven by the rise of finance. The chapters chart the field’s evolution from research describing and critiquing the manifestations of financialization towards scholarship that pinpoints the driving forces, mechanisms and boundaries of financialization. Written for researchers and students not only in economics but from across the social sciences and the humanities, this book offers a decidedly global and pluri-disciplinary view on financialization for those who are looking to understand the changing face of finance and its consequences.

Beginning with an original historical vision of financialization in human history, this volume then continues with a rich set of contemporary ethnographic case studies from Europe, Asia and Africa. Authors explore the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship, how it adapts to non-Western religious traditions, and how it reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization, and urban social relations in general. Central themes include the indebtedness of individuals and households, the impact of digital technologies, the struggle for housing, financial education, and political contestation.