Neoliberal Financialization Research Articles

Investments in Societal Complexity, Diminishing Marginal Returns and Neoliberalism: A Note

Investments in Societal Complexity, Diminishing Marginal Returns and Neoliberalism: A Note discusses the switch from Keynesian Fordism to Financialization as the organizing model for economic policy from the 1970s on, and the consequences for the world economy as understood via the lens of Joseph Tainter's theory regading societal investments on complexity passing a point of diminishing returns and decreasing societal slack. Specifically it argues that as the Fordist post-World War II economic model ran into such returns, policymakers attempted to improve the trend via neoliberal as a way of pursuing efficiencies, and ultimately the deeper reorganization of Neoliberal Financialization, a process which ultimately failed to fulfill the goal set for it and actually worsened the trend. Specifically, while it brought an extreme increase in the complexity of economic life (in the hypertrophy of finance, rising trans-national flows of investment and trade, and overall financial and economic integration globally), all the complexity went along with a continued decline in returns and eroding societal slack (with major states deindustrializing, economic growth rates declining, debt-to-GDP ratios rising, fiscal space shrinking, etc.).

A strange lobster tale of self-sacrificial transversality: or, transversal poetics flourishes in the spectral ether of Deleuze, Bataille, and Shakespeare

ABSTRACTWritten from the perspective of Transversal Poetics, this essay involves an exploration of the theory’s various selves in the context of a self-immolating spectacle staged at London’s New Globe Theatre by the theory’s progenitor, Dr. Bryan Reynolds. The essay outlines the history of this scandalous affair, which was inspired by the work of Rodrigo Garcia (Accidens: Matar Para Comer), Deleuze and Guattari, and George Bataille. Transversal Poetics travels with Reynolds to London and is shocked and appalled by the lurid transgression that unfolds on stage as Reynolds is hung on a massive hook and then dismembered for the adoring crowds. Exploring the complexity of its own reactions to this new initiative by Reynolds – and his attempt to conceive an ‘offspring’ with Bataille through a highly questionable and outrageous Deleuzian approach – Transversal Poetics is itself subtly transformed. It casts a powerful light on the urban milieu surrounding the New Globe (Southwark, the City of London) as it brings the era of neoliberal financialization to a close. A lobster-city that combines both ‘central place’ and the ‘maritime’ qualities (as identified by Christaller), London turns out to be the perfect location for the demolition of the Deleuzian taboo against the sacrificial.

Kriza neoliberalne financijalizacije na evropskoj poluperiferiji - prekarnost tržišta rada u Bosni i Hercegovini

Kriza neoliberalne financijalizacije na evropskoj poluperiferiji - prekarnost tržišta rada u Bosni i Hercegovini

Participatory art within, against and beyond financialization: benign pessimism, tactical parasitics and the encrypted common

ABSTRACTThis essay examines three critical artists who orchestrate participatory spectacles and experiences as a means of challenging neoliberal financialization, an overarching paradigm and process that is reshaping economics, politics, society and culture. Critical art, I argue, can offer us a particularly insightful vantage point on these transformations. This is not, as it is usually supposed, because art has some lofty transcendental perspective above society; rather, it is precisely because art is already so deeply integrated into finance and financialization. Not coincidentally, “participation” appears as a keyword for the restructuring of both art and finance today, which I argue is key to understanding the challenges, limits and potentials of even avowedly critical participatory art, with lessons for cultural production more broadly. In order to analyse and draw broader lessons from the three artworks in question, I identify each with a strategic paradigm: benign pessimism, tactical parasitism and the encrypted common. These strategies, I argue, emerge within, against and beyond financialization and can help complicate our approach to its complex cultural politics.

Petromodernity, petro-finance and plastic in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest

This article reads Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest (1990) and its account of the discovery of the Matacão – a mysterious plastic bedrock found in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest – as bound to the nation’s recent history of neoliberal financialization and petrolic extraction. The Matacão is examined as an allegory for the dispossession of peasant communities by multinational capitalism through its references to historical resource rushes as well as the developmental arcs of discovery, excavation and exhaustion attending commodity booms. The discussion concludes by examining the text’s framing of North American influence in Brazil alongside the emergence of extra-human resistance to the commodification of the Amazon. Amanda Boetzkes and Andrew Pendakis have argued that plastic makes “visible a stratigraphy of oil capital”, and, likewise, this article connects the local and global production of petro-ecological surpluses, petro-plastic waste and petro-dollar debt as rendered in Yamashita’s novel.

Investing in College Education: Debtors, Bettors, Lenders, Brokers

Federal and private lenders have issued college student loans, now rising above $1.3 trillion nationwide and, to gain revenues for continued lending, sell them to securitizers who in turn bundle them into asset-backed securities. This paper argues that the magnitude of debt, high rates of default and forgiveness, and uncertain long-term repayment by borrowers facing lackluster job opportunities replicate the techniques of neoliberal financialization (subprime mortgages, securitization, overstocked housing market) that triggered the 2008 economic meltdown.

Fiscal Orientalism: China Panic, the Indebted Citizen, and the Spectacle of National Debt

This essay critically examines the proliferating media artifacts and political discourses that dramatize China’s ownership of U.S. national debt in contemporary America. It argues that this new mode of representing China is best captured by the term “fiscal orientalism.” Complementing techno-orientalism, a configuration prompted by Japan’s (technological) rise in the 1980s, fiscal orientalism draws attention to the ideological work performed by a menacing “Chinese future.” Fiscal-orientalist narratives, by conjoining the time of the Other with the time of debt, racialize the effects of neoliberal financialization and perpetuate a historically specific form of indebted citizenship.

Knowledge Economy and the Commons

Knowledge is increasingly thought of as a common good. This is exhibited in the fact that many central economies are moving towards economic paradigms where knowledge plays a fundamental role. This paper explores the confluence between both processes, asking in what ways an economic model based on the knowledge commons can open up new socioeconomic scenarios in the face of overwhelming neoliberal financialization.

Neoliberal Forms

This paper examines the co-implications of CGI filmmaking, US hegemony, and neoliberal financialization as manifested in Korea’s “IMF crisis cinema.” These films are populated by what I term neoliberal forms that epitomize the effort in this cinema to reflect on the innate proximity of popular filmmaking to finance, and specifically on the proximity between its own material apparatus and the economic apparatus that the IMF crisis inserted into the center of Korean public discourse.

Microfinance in a developed welfare state: A hybrid technology for the government of the outcast

Although microfinance is often thought of as a tool to address poverty in developing countries, it is also being introduced in a number of countries in the developed world. The paper presents a qualitative study of the first year of the introduction of microfinance to address vulnerable groups in Sweden. Savings banks and nonprofit organisations collaborated in the introduction of microfinance as microcredit for micro-enterprise. The paper argues that the rationalities behind actors’ participation in microfinance differed, with banks adopting a market rationality and nonprofits mainly a rationality of community empowerment. In line with a governmentality approach, the paper argues that the neoliberal market rationality dominating microcredit for micro-enterprise colonises the space of the communitarian aspect by turning the social into the personal. The paper’s qualitative approach complements a governmentality analysis by highlighting the everyday resistance to the neoliberal financialisation of inclusion efforts.

The migration–development nexus: Rendering migrants as transnational financial subjects through housing

Finance driven growth is providing a new development agenda for migrants’ remittances. Although there is a considerable amount of scholarship on migrants’ transnational social and economic practices and their potential development impacts in origin and destination countries, the migration–development nexus has yet to be examined as part of the globalising process of economic financialisation of the last three decades. In light of the growing importance of remittances as a source of finance for sending countries, migrant workers have emerged as important agents to be incorporated into the dynamics of the global financial system.Drawing on empirical data collected at the London–Colombia migration network, this paper explores the Colombian government’s efforts to channel remittances to housing and finance and migrant households’ (alternative) strategies for accessing housing transnationally. It argues that conceptualising migrants as transnational financial subjects is a useful tool for understanding the latest round of enthusiasm around the migration–development nexus. In particular, the recasting of migrants as agents of development is linked to wider attempts at the institutionalisation of migrants’ transnational socio-economic practices. These attempts are embedded in ideologically-driven neoliberal discourses of citizenship that privilege financial markets as the medium for households’ socioeconomic reproduction and ambition to exploit migrant households’ connection to broader circuits of capital and finance. However, the evidence suggests that Colombian migrant households are resisting these state-assigned financial subjectivities, which points to the government’s failure to shape the everyday actions of remitters and their families and thus, the limits and uncertainties of the process of neoliberal financialisation.

A Study on the Structural Change of Capital Accumulation System by Neoliberal Financialization in U.S.A

A Study on the Structural Change of Capital Accumulation System by Neoliberal Financialization in U.S.A

The economics of deleveraging: The aftermath of financialization

This paper provides a simple model of deleveraging that surfaces the contradictions inherent in neoliberal financialization and explains the pattern of US business cycles over the past thirty years. Deleveraging involves a two step correction. The first step is when a borrowing boom ends. The second step is when agents increase saving and re-pay debt. Borrowing accelerates economic activity as consumers spend. When borrowing stops, the economy slows. Moreover, the economy is further slowed by accumulated debt burdens. With deleveraging, households increase saving and re-pay debt which deepens the economic slowdown. Repayment reduces debt, helping economic activity eventually to recover.

Enabling TRIPs: The pharma–biotech–university patent coalition

ABSTRACT The dominant player behind the Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement, as regards patents, was a handful of American pharmaceutical transnational corporations (‘big pharma’). Given that TRIPs was exceptionally controversial, how was US big pharma uniquely enabled to command the entire trade diplomatic machinery of the US and, through that, enact global law in its favour? This paper explores one crucial factor in the enacting of TRIPs, namely the prior pursuit of domestic US patent reform, from which a highly integrated and powerful single-issue political coalition between US big pharma, the new biotechnology sector and academic life science departments was formed. This created the political context in the US in which patent issues, particularly those affecting the pharmaceuticals industry, came to be considered matters of state. But explaining both the success of this patent coalition and the subsequent success of the US-led international demands for TRIPs in turn demands appeal to analysis of the structure of the global economy and its transformation to one of neoliberal financialisation, from a watershed of 1980. The paper explores how the critical histories of each of the three sectors of the patent coalition are illuminated by analysis in the context of this structural change and the underlying connections between apparently disparate issues it reveals.