42 research outputs found
The Governance of the Black Holes of the World Economy: Shadow Banking and Offshore Finance
This paper focuses on regulatory challenges posed by the two interconnected structures of the global financial system – the economy of tax havens (or offshore financial centres), and the shadow banking system. The financial crisis of 2007-09 has revealed that tax havens structures and shadow banking entities play a central role in the practise of financial institutions reliant on financial innovation. Thriving on complexity, opaque networks and driven by arbitrage, the two phenomena pose tremendous challenges to national and international regulators aiming to restore the financial cycle in the recessionary environment. In this paper, we analyse "the state of play" and the current plans for the governance of tax havens, offshore finance and the shadow banking industry. We find that although offshore financial centres and shadow banking are outside the scope of academic economics, they have attracted a lot of attention on the part of financial researchers and regulators. Along with other macro-prudential and system risk concerns, the regulation, or governance of these "black holes" of the global economy is increasingly assuming a central place on the agenda of financial regulators. In what follows, we explore the reasons behind this development
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A Crisis of the Overcrowded Future: Shadow Banking and the Political Economy of Financial Innovation
This article focuses on the role the shadow banking system played in the financial crisis of 2007–9. Engaging with emergent theories of shadow banking, I inquire into its structural role in contemporary capitalism. My main premise here is that the crisis of 2007–9 is distinct in financial history because it did not centre on any organised market. Rather, it was crisis of the overcrowded financial channels bridging the present and the future, which have become congested because of the massive concentration of financial values generated, yet not sustained, through the shadow banking network. My analysis suggests that shadow banking has determined the nature of financial crisis of 2007–9 and continues to play a necessary role in financial capitalism based on futurity. Drawing on scholarship in financial Keynesianism, contemporary legal studies and early evolutionary political economy, I argue that shadow banking is best seen as the organic institutional infrastructure of financialised capitalism based on debt and geared towards futurity, a concept originally developed by John Commons
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Politics, capital and the City: London’s financial reign in the face of internal and external shifts
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Banks as Global Corporations: From Entities to ‘Ecological Habitats’
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Elsewhere, Ideally Nowhere: Shadow Banking and Offshore Finance
If we were to identify one common thread across the nancial system’s stages of evolution, it is the quest for being located for tax and regulatory purposes elsewhere or, ideally, nowhere. Recognising the limits of mainstream economic models in providing a comprehensive explanation of this phenomenon, we draw on the ideas of orstein Veblen and his theory of business civilisation. A Veblenian analysis suggests that dynamics and behaviour in nance that are commonly associated with human failure (greed, exuberance, fraud, incompetence), and which appear to have become widespread practice, should best be understood as sabotage. Finance is awash with techniques designed to sabotage both clients and the governments who enacted regulations that were supposed to protect clients. ese techniques are legal mechanisms, albeit as Veblen writes, not in the spirit of the law.
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The role of shadow banking entities in the financial crisis: a disaggregated view
This article examines the role of the shadow banking system in the global financial crisis of 2007–9. In order to do this, one must first explain the reasons for the explosive growth of shadow banking in the immediate pre-crisis era. Current explanations for this growth tend to hold two contrasting sector (notably regulatory arbitrage and financial innovation); the other emphasising exogenous factors (notably the ‘search for yield’). Integrating these two explanations, in this article we develop a disaggregated view of the shadow banking system. After clarifying the nature of the relation between the regulated and shadow banking systems, we inquire more closely into the different entities that inhabit the shadow banking system, the different activities that these entities performed and the different financial products that these entities supplied. The disaggregated view of shadow banking suggests that while some parts of the system played an important role in the initial subprime phase of the crisis through their involvement with the toxic securities that were at its centre, other parts of the system were key to the subsequent money and inter-bank phases of the crisis through their close ties with the regulated banks
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The best of both worlds: scale economies and discriminatory policies in London’s global financial centre
From the early 1960s onwards London has managed to vie with New York for the top spot as an international financial centre. Ever since then, London has reigned as a leading global financial hub, despite not having behind it anything like the political or economic backing enjoyed by New York. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by building on Kindleberger’s classic analysis of financial centres as international hubs that arise due to economic, geographic and infrastructural advantages, and more recent theories of specialized financial centres which suggest that financial centres deploy discriminatory business practices in order to compete with the scale economy-based centres. Our central claim is that London’s continuing financial supremacy can be traced to the way that the opposing ‘economic’ and ‘political’ sets of criteria necessary for a financial centre are here inextricably fused together in a mutually reinforcing dynamic. Three case studies are used to support this claim: the market for international loans and deposits; the forex (FX) and over the counter (OTC) derivatives markets; and the area of asset and collateral management
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An evolutionary approach to international political economy: the case of corporate tax avoidance
Corporate tax avoidance is both widespread and diverse in its practical mechanics. The scope of the phenomenon often leads economists to conclude that in the jungle of economic competition, tax planning (or optimisation) is among the necessary tools to ensure the survival of the fittest. This theory is increasingly associated with a Darwinian theory of economic evolution. In this paper, I develop a contrasting framework of the evolutionary political economy of corporate tax avoidance. Analysing core concepts of Old Institutionalist Economics (OIE), I examine the core drivers of corporate tax avoidance in a globalised system of states. The major contrast, I find, is between that of the corporate and legal personality and the institutional environment in which it operates. Historically, each corporate entity has been considered a separate legal person, yet a series of ‘mutations’ of incorporations laws created a widening gap between theory and reality, and these, in turn, give rise to tax arbitrage. Narrowing this gap, however, impinges on another venerable historical institution, the institution of sovereignty and sovereign inequality