Civil society and financial markets : what is not happening and why

Why have commercial financial flows – as a major force in contemporary society with a number of significant problematic consequences – attracted relatively little effective public-interest response from civil society? Change-oriented NGOs, labour unions, faith-based organisations and other social movements have mostly remained in the shadows vis-à-vis private financial markets. Impacts from these citizen associations have not gone beyond promoting modest rises in public awareness, certain limited policy shifts, and minor institutional reforms of a few public governance agencies. The reasons for these scant achievements are partly related to capacities and practices in civil society groups, relevant governance agencies, and financial firms. Also important in constraining civil society impacts to reform and transform contemporary financial markets are deeper structural circumstances such as embedded social hierarchies (among countries, classes, etc.), the pivotal role of finance capital in accumulation processes today, and the entrenchment of prevailing neoliberal policy discourses

Marx e a divisão do lucro médio em lucro do empresário e juro

A concepção da divisão qualitativa do lucro médio em lucro do empresário e juro foi um importante feito teórico de Marx, pois permitiu fundamentar de modo coerente a conceituação do juro como parte da mais-valia, uma vez constituída a taxa média de lucro e sua materialização no lucro médio de cada capital. O objetivo deste artigo é desenvolver e formalizar algumas implicações desta conceituação, em alguns casos à primeira vista desconcertantes. A extensão e a formalização das implicações da divisão do lucro médio, elaboradas por Hilferding, com base nas indicações de Marx, permitiram revelar um novo ângulo do papel do sistema de crédito como potencializador do processo de acumulação. Demonstra-se no artigo que a taxa simples de lucro do empresário perde relevância como indicador de rentabilidade dos capitais, e propõe-se e fundamenta-se a utilização de novo indicador, ao mesmo tempo em que é apontada a relevância de um novo e decisivo fator na análise teórica das taxas de lucro dos capitais individuais

Writing Russia's future: paradigms, drivers, and scenarios

The development of prediction and forecasting in the social sciences over the past century and more is closely linked with developments in Russia. The Soviet collapse undermined confidence in predictive capabilities, and scenario planning emerged as the dominant future-oriented methodology in area studies, including the study of Russia. Scenarists anticipate multiple futures rather than predicting one. The approach is too rarely critiqued. Building on an account of Russia-related forecasting in the twentieth century, analysis of two decades of scenarios reveals uniform accounts which downplay the insights of experts and of social science theory alike

Class dynamics of development: a methodological note

This article argues that class relations are constitutive of developmental processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. In doing so it illustrates and explains the diversity of the actually existing forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to re- vitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences

The Political Economy of Shadow Banking: Debt, Finance, and Distributive Politics Under a Kalecki-Goodwin-Minsky SFC Framework

This paper describes the political economy of shadow banking and how it relates to the dramatic institutional changes experienced by global capitalism over past 100 years. We suggest that the dynamics of shadow banking rest on the distributive tension between workers and firms. Politics wedge the operation of the shadow financial system as government policy internalizes, guides, and participates in dealings mediated by financial intermediaries. We propose a broad theoretical overview to formalize a stock-flow consistent (SFC) political economy model of shadow banking (stylized around the operation of money market mutual funds, or MMMFs). Preliminary simulations suggest that distributive dynamics indeed drive and provide a nest for the dynamics of shadow banking

Global Financial Crisis: A Minskyan Interpretation of the Causes, the Fed’s Bailout, and the Future

This paper provides a quick review of the causes of the Global Financial Crisis that began in 2007. There were many contributing factors, but among the most important were rising inequality and stagnant incomes for most American workers, growing private sector debt in the United States and many other countries, financialization of the global economy (itself a very complex process), deregulation and desupervision of financial institutions, and overly tight fiscal policy in many nations. The analysis adopts the stages approach developed by Hyman P. Minsky, according to which a gradual transformation of the economy over the postwar period has in many ways reproduced the conditions that led to the Great Depression. The paper then moves on to an examination of the US government's bailout of the global financial system. While other governments played a role, the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve assumed much of the responsibility for the bailout. A detailed examination of the Fed's response shows how unprecedented - and possibly illegal - was its extension of the government's safety net to the biggest financial institutions. The paper closes with an assessment of the problems the bailout itself poses for the future