Financial Elites Research Articles

The Philosophy, Politics and Economics of Food

The undergraduate degree Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) has attracted a stereotype of developing future political and financial elites with little regard to the subject material covered in the programme. This clashes with student expectations and university messaging on PPE, which, especially at the University of Warwick, highlight the importance of interdisciplinary perspectives for addressing complex global challenges. This introduction to this special section argues that it is imperative to centre students’ voices in defining PPE, and, to this end, showcases a co-creation process aimed at developing an interdisciplinary module. The resulting module on the PPE of food thereby speaks to how students understand their PPE: as a programme that breaks with interdisciplinary silos to answer complex questions relevant to the world we live in.

Japanese financial elites and banking supervision: the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Japan

ABSTRACT Japan experienced a bubble economy in the late 1980s and a financial crisis in the 1990s, and the banking supervision system was criticized for failing to prevent excessive risk-taking behavior among commercial banks. In this study, I examine whether, and if so why, the banking supervision system deteriorated over the period in question, focusing on human capital, especially among the elites, in relation to banking supervision in Japan. I focus on two elements of banking supervision: the transition of supervisory policy and the characteristics (e.g. education, career path) of the heads of supervisory departments. The 49 Directors of the Financial Inspection Department in the MOF from 1927 to 1998 and the 26 Directors-General of the Bank Examination Department in the BOJ from 1928 to 1981 are analyzed. I also analyze the performance of several regional banks that appointed an ex-Director of the MOF as their president to check whether such an intimate bank – supervisor relationship worsened those banks’ management. The results showed no evidence of bad management as a result of that relationship. Rather, an increased burden on examiners and a reduced awareness of the importance of risk management led to the reduced effectiveness of banking supervision.

The new world monetary system – prerequisites for creation and implementation mechanisms

The article examines the main directions of creating a new global monetary system as the basis for the formation of an alternative global financial architecture. The strengthening of the role of the BRICS countries in the global financial and monetary system is shown. The main financial indicators of the New Development Bank (NDB) are analyzed, including the history of its creation, share capital, loan portfolio, borrowed funds from the global capital market. The prospects for the development of the NTB and its ability to participate in the formation of a new global financial and monetary system independent of the Anglo-Saxon financial elite and international financial institutions controlled by it are assessed. The possibilities of introducing a single Brics unit of account into the NBR are being considered.

Organizing Minds and Managing People: J.P. Morgan Bankers on Transatlantic Consolidation of Communication and Capital, 1917–1920

AbstractDuring the Great War, J.P. Morgan bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Henry P. Davison, and Dwight W. Morrow expanded their visions of organizing across distances and supported the development of spaces where like-minded individuals could make coordinated decisions regarding the stability of industrial capitalism. These financial elites focused not only on profits but also on deeper ideas. Their experience organizing across distances, first domestically and then across the Atlantic, demonstrates the importance of these financiers to visions of global economic governance centered on information exchange and communication, intimate long-distance relationships, and deliberation among perceived equals, which are essential elements of merchant banking. Their visions further reflected a hierarchical and racial understanding of a liberal global order. Highly flexible in their strategies, these bankers possessed long-term views of national and global development that engaged overlapping connections among networks, institutions, and the public that privileged the creation of transatlantic spaces for deliberation and socialization among Western economic elites.

Coloniality, Race, and Europeanness: Britain’s Borders after Brexit

Abstract The scholarship on the politics of immigration often frames governments’ responses to far-right mobilization as a return to border closures and a rowing back on neoliberalism. In this article, I draw on and expand the scholarship on coloniality to address the limitations of this diagnosis. Specifically, I explore the role of political mobilization in the making of the post-Brexit border regime. My research draws on the analysis of legal and policy initiatives between 2020 and 2023 and twenty-three research interviews with individuals who express their opposition to immigration via engagement in think tanks, grassroots organizations and vigilante groups. The interview data indicates multiple connections between these milieus and shows that each engages in action repertoires beyond the nation-state. And while this prompts border closures, the post-Brexit border regime also encodes openings and loopholes for the circulation of financial elites and precariously employed workers. Thus, I argue that state and non-state actors co-produce a neoliberal border regime of stratified rights, partial inclusions, and gradual exclusions. These variegated entitlements draw on and reinvigorate the racial order of coloniality. The post-Brexit immigration regime enables the free mobility of those racialized as “West European,” facilitates disposable labor mobility of those racialized as “Eastern European,” and restricts the movement of those racialized as “non-European.” This racial imaginary does not only operate via binary distinctions of (non)-Britishness but puts people in complex hierarchical relations to “Europeanness.”

Cadre Personnel Management and the Central–Local Relations of China’s Financial Governance: The Rise of ‘Airlifted’ Vice-Provincial Governors in Financial Affairs

ABSTRACT Since the 18th National Party Congress, many high-ranking business executives and regulators from China’s financial system have been appointed as the so-called ‘airlifted’ vice-provincial governors in financial affairs. This article presents a systematic biographic profile of this group of rising technocrats. It argues that in appointing these central financial elites to provinces, the Party centre has used the cadre personnel management system to promote governance capability building through technocratic professionalization of local administrative leadership, and drive the recentralization of financial governance as Chinese political economy overall shifts towards prioritizing risk management, systemic stability and national security. It also constitutes a venue for cadre grooming. Moreover, this personnel control via airlifting technocratic appointments has often been prompted, and also constrained, by a short-term crisis management imperative to deal with local financial turbulence and restore market stability.

Banker, pastor, teef: Christian financial elites and vernaculars of accountability in Ghana

AbstractWhen nine Ghanaian banks collapsed during the country's 2017–2019 financial crisis, a Charismatic Pentecostal pastor was at the center of public accusations as the board chairman of one of the failed banks. His role put a spotlight on the growing influence of Charismatic Pentecostal institutions and elites in Ghana's financial market. Shifting the perspective between diverse actors who reckoned with the bank's collapse, from ordinary Christians to artist‐activists, this article explores how Ghanaians evaluated the culpability of the pastor and in so doing problematized who Christian elites involved in banking and business are accountable to: God, their congregants, or the public at large? We argue that global financial liberalization has generated new types of financial elites, Pentecostal pastors among them, who become subject to new lines of accountability. Holding someone accountable comes with stakes expressed through vernacular registers that demonstrate how financial markets are engulfed in broader social relations and regimes of ethical evaluation.

Income Inequality and External Wealth of Nations

Abstract We study the relationship between income inequality and external wealth using dynamic panel data models with 5-years average observations to consider the slow motion of available data in the case of 88 emerging and developing economies for the period 1970–2020. We find evidence of a significant positive association between inequality indicators and net external wealth. This relationship is statistically significant for all income inequality measures and net external wealth variables. If the Top 1 of the richest individuals in a given country increments their share by 1 % point this will produce an average same-year increment in net foreign assets of 0.45 % in terms of the country’s GDP. The long-run effect is more than double in magnitude (1.05 % of GDP). For the Top 10, the long-run effect increases tenfold (11.6 % of GDP). When disaggregated into foreign assets and liabilities, we find a heterogeneous behavior of the financial elites. These findings reveal that financialized elites have a greater propensity to accumulate external wealth than the rest of the population.

Climate change and the politicization of ESG in the US

ESG, or environmental, social, and governance, is seen by some as an instrument to tackle climate change, and by others as a tool to allow investors to assess climate change risks and opportunities. It has been widely politicized in the US, where Republican critics have characterized it as an attempt by the liberal financial elite to impose a leftist decarbonizing mission on the US economy through an investment risk back door. The current paper explores the way in which ESG has become a, perhaps unlikely, object of politicization by the political right. In doing so, it analyses the meaning of politicization in an ESG context and the various forms it has taken, both discursive and substantive. The paper also seeks to explain why it is that ESG politicization has occurred at particular junctures and draws on political opportunity theory from social movement studies to account for this. It further examines various reactions to the politicization of ESG that have sought to depoliticize it.

On the Historical Evolution of the Northern League in Italy

In 2018, Italy’s newly formed government, which included the far right League, raised concerns among European political and financial elites. The international press portrayed the parties that won the elections as the (Eurosceptic) barbarians ready to besiege the city walls of Rome. In this article, I argue that hard-line anti-immigration policies were their most visible characteristic. In particular, I demonstrate that the League’s xenophobic approach was not new, as its precursors already promoted discrimination, and that the party moved from regionalism to the far right side of the political spectrum. I also question the party’s recent national(ist) shift, which seems to have been made uncritically and for pragmatic, electoral reasons. The article thus contributes to the history of the far right since the 1980s while demonstrating the usefulness of a historical methodology for scholars from other disciplines who work on right-wing prejudice.

Populist Inclusion of Ecuadorian Emigrants under Rafael Correa’s Presidency

Abstract This article studies Rafael Correa’s populist inclusion of Ecuadorian emigrants. It unpacks Correa’s inclusionary populism toward the emigrants at symbolic, political, and material levels. The article utilizes a qualitative content analysis of Correa’s weekly TV show, the Citizen Link (2007–2017). The findings reveal that Correa considered the emigrants as part of “the people,” who were forced to leave the country after the 1999 Banking Crisis. In line with his left-wing populist leadership, Correa viewed them as the victims of neoliberalism and the financial elite. Moreover, Correa politically included the emigrants by extending their voting rights and creating permanent seats in the National Assembly. Finally, Correa materially included the Ecuadorian emigrants by increasing the number of embassies, consulates, and cultural houses as well as facilitating the emigrants’ return. These findings have implications for the relationship between populism and emigration in Latin America and other migrant-sending regions.

Radical Mercantilism and Fascist Italy’s East African Empire

AbstractThis article traces the evolution of Italian strategies for imperial expansion from the decades after unification—when many came to believe that imperial conquest would more advantageously position Italy in the liberal capitalist global economy—to the height of the fascist colonial project in the Horn of Africa—when the fascists tried to break with the liberal global economy and construct a new, radical mercantilist and corporatist empire. Taking inspiration from their predecessors, the fascist regime extracted capital, resources, and labor from Africans and Italians to finance its war against the Ethiopian empire and its colonization of the Horn. While the war temporarily stimulated Italian industry, employed hundreds of thousands of work-hungry Italians, and consolidated the regime’s many corporatist institutions, it drained Italy’s reserves and alarmed the Duce’s allies among Italy’s industrial and financial elite. The regime, thus, shifted strategies, focusing on reducing the cost of the empire by exploiting African workers, eliminating inefficient small enterprises, and creating vast concessions for Italian industrialists. Conquering new territories and markets, acquiring a variety of primary resources, and empowering industry, Mussolini and the radical mercantilist-corporatists aimed to resolve Italy’s perceived under-development, by placing Italy at the center of a great fascist Eurafrican empire that could dictate the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world.

Oligopolska struktura na tržištu kriptovaluta

Blockchain technology has been announced as the driving force behind the democratization of digital business. Various interest groups believed that cryptocurrencies would enable fast, cheap and anonymous payments over the Internet. The absence of a central institution and the possibility of the participation of the wider community in the maintenance of the system should have created electronic money adapted to individuals, not the financial elite. However, the question arises whether cryptocurrencies really provide equal opportunities for all participants. The subject of the paper is the degree of centralization of the most famous cryptocurrency systems in terms of wealth distribution and the possibility of participation in their maintenance. The goal of the paper is to determine the degree of inequality in various aspects of the functioning of the cryptocurrency system. The results of the analysis indicate that cryptocurrencies function separately from the traditional financial system, but do not enable the financial inclusion of marginalized social groups. No current cryptocurrency community provides equality of participants, neither in terms of mining, nor in terms of wealth distribution. It can be concluded that the mining of cryptocurrencies and their secondary circulation show clear characteristics of oligopolistic structures.

Belgian Financial Elites and Destructive Entrepreneurship in King Leopold’s Congo Free State

Belgian Financial Elites and Destructive Entrepreneurship in King Leopold’s Congo Free State

Interpellating Finance – a dramaturgical model for green bond pricing

Global financial governance is turning green. Attempting to tackle climate change, financial elites seem to swing confusingly between hesitant and action aimed at relieving the contradictions that led to the crisis, and opportunistic co-optation of critical discourse. Drawing on the work of Althusser, Laclau and Butler, we describe the historical emergence of this green financial apparatus and the related proliferation of green labels and signifiers. Green labels serve as the malleable ground on which a diversity of meanings and positions are articulated and temporarily fixed. Labels are the names through which financiers are interpellated and constituted as green ideological subjects. Through an analysis of the mechanisms of green bonds pricing, and of the actors involved in a green bond boot camp, we contend that the added value of green financial instruments, called the greenium, cannot merely be attributed to the performativity of models and formulas for risk engineering. Rather, it is the material effect of a subjectivation apparatus attuned to the existing relations of production. Ultimately, the greenness which becomes encrypted in the greenium is a process of translation of language of capital valorisation, performed through the tendency of capital to reproduce relations of exploitation in transitional time.

They’re Coming for You! How Perceptions of Automation Affect Public Support for Universal Basic Income

Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic descriptive findings are largely untested: we don’t know much about whether Americans support UBI, see automation as a threat to their job, or connect the two in any meaningful way. Using a Mechanical Turk survey of 3600 respondents, we examine the relationship between Americans’ perception of how much automation threatens their jobs, how much automation actually threatens their jobs, and their support for UBI. Our results indicate that while the public does not view automation as the same threat that elites do, Americans who believe their jobs will be automated are more likely to support UBI. These relationships, however, vary considerably by political party.

Charles Wright Mills' Concept of "The Power Elite" Triangle According to the Georgian Model of 1990-2020

The paper presents similarities and differences of Charles Wright Mills's concept of "The Power Elite" triangle on the Georgian model of 1990-2020. The article presents a research on the Georgian analogue of the Mills concept in the context of church power, army and, in general, force power, economic and financial elites. It is also about the promotion of the bourgeoisie in the American society and the factors of developed skills, which essentially differentiates the American existence from the Georgian existence. In the article, I discuss the conditions, which represent The Mills concept, on the example of Georgia, how the factor of church power differs, which in our case plays the role of essential influencing power, what was the condition of the rulers of Georgia over the years against the background of the confrontation between secular and clerical power elites, and what is the overall result we got today. The article provides a qualification that is derived from research and analysis. The article explains why financially powerful groups and individuals in political and governmental layers are getting stronger in Georgia, why citizens do not have the appropriate conditions for influence, what factors prevent the strengthening of civic influence in Georgia. In some cases, the Mills constructions, like the example of Georgia, even look paradoxical, declaring that the state is one, while creating a radically different reality and trend. The article studies the influence of the Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia on maintaining power in Georgia and its characteristics. There are highlighted Mills views about democracy resources, context and content comparability, the factors impacting the bourgeoisie in the development and strengthening democracy, that is represented quite differently in Georgian model. The article discovers the theoretic factors that hinders the development of democratic values in Georgia - the historical and modern contexts of aristocracy and feudalism, superiority of church hierarchy in maintaining power, secular authorities longing for authoritarianism and mutual subordination of secular and clerical power elites with the weird synthesis of partnership.

Joint Latent Space Model for Social Networks with Multivariate Attributes.

In social, behavioral and economic sciences, researchers are interested in modeling a social network among a group of individuals, along with their attributes. The attributes can be responses to survey questionnaires and are often high dimensional. We propose a joint latent space model (JLSM) that summarizes information from the social network and the multivariate attributes in a person-attribute joint latent space. We develop a variational Bayesian expectation-maximization estimation algorithm to estimate the attribute and person locations in the joint latent space. This methodology allows for effective integration, informative visualization and prediction of social networks and attributes. Using JLSM, we explore the French financial elites based on their social networks and their career, political views and social status. We observe a division in the social circles of the French elites in accordance with the differences in their attributes. We analyze user networks and behaviors in multimodal social media systems like YouTube. A R package "jlsm" is developed to fit the models proposed in this paper and is publicly available from the CRAN repository https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/jlsm/jlsm.pdf .

Selling to Wall Street: Theorizing the Financial Commodity Audience in Network Era Television

Although the business-friendly policies and neoliberal ideologies of the 1970s and 1980s certainly accelerated the financialized state of media industries, it is necessary to understand how cultural production has long been subject to the vicissitudes of finance capital. Complementing histories on the role of banking in the formation of the U.S. film industry, this paper explores the interrelationships between finance and a nascent U.S. television industry. Examining trade press discourses and contextualized quantitative data, this case study asks how financialization affected the structures of postwar U.S. broadcasting and the programming and audience targeting of the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) between 1953 and 1964. Rather than simply representing an external force constraining artistic production, the thrust of financialization created a fundamental reorientation of ABC from the inside out. Indeed, during this period, ABC shifted its target audience to, in part, please financial intermediaries but paradoxically alienated those financial elites in the process by turning away from culturally legitimate genres like anthology dramas and high-brow variety series. In charting these continuities and changes, this paper offers a theory of the “financial commodity audience” that helps articulate how financial stakeholders have valued a particular type of viewer: white coastal elites, particularly men. The evidence presented in this case also suggests that cultural industries have been well suited to the extractionary logics of financialization due to the intangibility of their assets and imagined audiences. In this way, media histories remain critical to understanding the power dynamics of financialization and contemporary media industries.

Czy obecna rzeczywistość sprzyja wdrażaniu zrównoważonego rozwoju?

The idea of sustainable development did not appear in the eighteenth century for ecological reasons to save the environment or humanitarian reasons to save humanity, but for economic reasons to improve the management of forests and fossil resources. Its creator was Hans Carl v. Carlowitz (1645-1714), a Saxon tax accountant and mining administrator. The idea has always served an economic purpose – constant economic growth as well as increase of productivity and profit. Therefore, it worked best in the sphere of management. Over time, it turned out that one could achieve better economic effects. when one combines economic goals with those that people have always strived for – to create a better world, life and interpersonal relations. This requires care for the good condition of the natural and social environment. Consequently, the idea of sustainable development was coupled with the goals of ecology and sozology. Unfortunately, for various reasons, the modern world is less and less conducive to achieving these goals. Therefore, one can increasingly difficult implement the postulates of sustainable development, even in the sphere of economy. It has become clear that sustainable development is not a panacea for all the ills of the world. The idea of this unrealizable development turned into a myth and a tool to manipulate people's feelings and dreams of a better life. With their help, one mobilizes people to higher and higher productivity, which generates an increase in the enrichment of the financial elite and to the accompanying to it deepening of social inequalities, which are the source of all the evil.