Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance analyses how global financialized capitalism operates and reproduces itself, exploring the remarkable ability of the financial sector to maintain its dominance through even the most severe economic crises. The book defines international financialization as a process by which the number and value, the tradability, and the enforceability of cross-border financial claims increase and are successfully defended against competing social or political agendas. By focusing on financial claims, the volume develops a conceptual toolkit for the study of the political economy of global finance and the inequalities it sustains. The book brings together leading researchers whose work is geared towards opening the black box of cross-border finance. The authors suggest shifting the analytical focus from capital flows to capital claims – credit–debt relations between identifiable actors, embedded in social and political institutions, and infused with power and hierarchy. They show how financial actors wield leverage power, infrastructural power, and enforcement power, both vis-à-vis other private actors and vis-à-vis the state. This book will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers of international political economy, critical political economy, and international relations, as well as those in the fields of finance, capitalism studies, activism, policymaking, and advocacy. An Online Appendix for Chapter 11 is available at: www.routledge.com/9781032111193

Global Financial Networked Governance provides a careful analysis of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and the standard-setters under its umbrella to show how such government networks harness the power of public reputation to herd their members into compliance. The FSB’s track record in coordinating global financial regulatory reform is uneven. Some items on its agenda have seen the rapid evolution of globally coordinated regulatory standards and their implementation by all member states, sometimes even ahead of the stipulated timelines. In contrast, other initiatives have stalled at different stages of the policymaking process, global coordination is lacking, deadlines have been missed, and it is currently unclear when the post-crisis financial reform project will come to completion, if ever. In this book, the author asks the question: why has the FSB succeeded in some areas of its global financial regulatory coordination work and not in others? The book traces the global policymaking process in three major issue areas: banking regulation (Basel III), over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, and ending too-big-to-fail. Through a combination of careful process tracing and rigorous testing against alternative explanations, it challenges the existing literature by revealing that the institutional pathway of policymaking is the main predictor of FSB progress. It shows that government networks on their own have succeeded in implementing globally coherent safety standards. In contrast, legislation and legislators in key G20 countries have limited the power and effectiveness of the FSB. The author analyzes the causes and effects of this phenomenon and suggests a novel institutional solution to the effectiveness-legitimacy dilemma that global governance forums face, combining the advantages of functional specialization and electoral accountability. This book will be of great interest to graduate students; academics working at the intersection of economics, political science, and international law; students of the FSB in particular; and policymakers in global economic governance.

Offshore financial centers such as Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands or the City of London provide non-residents with a legal framework that is strong on property rights and soft on taxation and regulation. Building on a historical-institutionalist comparison of Britain, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico, Offshore Finance and State Power asks how these offshore financial services affect the power of the state. Combining a concept analysis with empirical research, the book finds that economic actors go offshore to create money more than to hide it. Legal offshore banking trumps tax planning or money laundering in its impact on state power. Offshore Finance and State Power also reveals that the relationship between the two is not straightforward. Offshore finance can limit state power by transmitting the volatility of unregulated offshore banking into the domestic economy. Yet, counterintuitively, offshore finance can also enhance state power. It provides governments with an extraterritorial vehicle to cover up political conflicts over how to finance the state and to mitigate class conflict. To which extent a state can put offshore finances at its own service, depends on a country's domestic elite constellation and the tax and bank bargains they have forged throughout history.

The Politics of the Eurogroup provides an intriguing look inside the euro crisis and the secretive forum of finance ministers that came to dominate it. The history of the European Union is a history of crises and the leaps of integration they triggered. As the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and global power competition are clouding the prospects of the European economies, the member states are looking for solutions. Yet they find their options highly constrained by the economic and political realities created in the decade of the euro crisis. This book fuses a critical political economy perspective on structural relations within the Economic and Monetary Union with a power- based approach to its institutions. It explains why a political project of European austerity emerged from the Eurogroup and side-lined alternative policies, with repercussions still felt today. The author introduces a series of interviews with key decision-makers – ministers, central bankers, and EU officials – as well as leaked audio recordings from Eurogroup meetings to give an authentic report of the power struggles between finance ministers. The book retraces how the Eurogroup rose to prominence in the crisis and how a few northern countries – led by the German and Dutch finance ministries – were able to exploit the group’s informal processes to shape the Economic and Monetary Union to their advantage. With its interdisciplinary and investigative approach, this book will be of great interest for scholars and students concerned with European integration, international political economy, economics, institutionalism, and governance. It will also be of value for policy makers in the fields of European politics and economic governance.

The Consulting Trap does a deep dive into how governments have become hooked on private consultancy firms with dire consequences for democratic decision-making, public accountability and accessible public services. Hurl and Werner contend that firms like McKinsey, Accenture, KPMG and Deloitte increasingly take responsibility for core public services, trapping governments in cycles of dependency. Through orchestrating tax avoidance for the wealthy while engineering austerity for the rest, these firms have created the foundations for the deepening privatization of the public services, further entrenching their power. Drawing on case studies from Canada and around the world, Hurl and Werner investigate how big consultancies leverage social networks, institutionalize relationships, mine and commodify data, and establish policy pipelines that facilitate the quick diffusion of ideas across jurisdictions. Drawing from real world examples, The Consulting Trap offers strategies for how these powerful firms can be resisted using people’s audits, public consultations, access to information requests, and social network analyses.

"A history of the globalization of US banking in the early twentieth century"--

Covid-19 and the Global Political Economy investigates and explores how far and in what ways the Covid-19 pandemic is challenging, restructuring, and perhaps remaking aspects of the global political economy. Since the 1970s, neoliberal capitalism has been the guiding principle of global development: fiscal discipline, privatisations, deregulation, the liberalisation of trade and investment regimes, and lower corporate and wealth taxation. But, after Covid-19, will these trends continue, particularly when states are continuing to struggle with overcoming the pandemic and violating one of neoliberalism’s key principles: balanced budgets? The pandemic has exposed the fragility of the global political economy, and it can be argued that the intensification of global trade, tourism, and finance over the past 30 years has facilitated the spread of infectious diseases such as Covid-19. Therefore, economies in lockdown, jittery markets, and massive government spending have sparked interest in potentially re-evaluating certain features of the global political economy. This volume brings together leading and upcoming critical scholars in international relations and international political economy to provide novel, timely, and innovative research on how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting (and will continue to impact) the global economy in important dimensions, including state fiscal policy, monetary policy, the accumulation of debt, health and social reproduction, and the future of austerity and the fate of neoliberalism. This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and experts in international relations and international political economy, as well as history, anthropology, political science, sociology, cultural studies, economics, development studies, and human geography. Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

How the creation of money and monetary policy can be more democratic The power to create money is foundational to the state. In the United States, that power has been largely delegated to private banks governed by an independent central bank. Putting monetary policy in the hands of a set of insulated, nonelected experts has fueled the popular rejection of expertise as well as a widespread dissatisfaction with democratically elected officials. In Our Money, Leah Downey makes a principled case against central bank independence (CBI) by both challenging the economic theory behind it and developing a democratic rationale for sustaining the power of the legislature to determine who can create money and on what terms. How states govern money creation has an impact on the capacity of the people and their elected officials to steer policy over time. In a healthy democracy, Downey argues, the balance of power over money creation matters. Downey applies and develops democratic theory through an exploration of monetary policy. In so doing, she develops a novel theory of independent agencies in the context of democratic government, arguing that states can employ expertise without being ruled by experts. Downey argues that it is through iterative governance, the legislature knowing and regularly showing its power over policy, that the people can retain their democratic power to guide policy in the modern state. As for contemporary macroeconomic arguments in defense of central bank independence, Downey suggests that the purported economic benefits do not outweigh the democratic costs.