Banks and their world view contexts

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2020

Throughout history, banking has been key to the development of fundamental institutions and structures of capitalism, while also having been instrumental in its recurrent crises. However, this significance isn't reflected in its definitions. In this brief note, I present a critical definition of banking institutions that takes into account their importance, and approaches banking from a variety of perspectives. It conceives the bank as a mercantile-rentier that overlays social inefficiencies in monetary allocation through the transmission of internallyproduced fungible rights in personam. This definition is an early synthesized result of ongoing research.

Within the social sciences, the concept of financialisation has come to refer to a diverse range of transformations which have taken place within the global economy over the last three decades. As such, it is a phenomena which is intrinsically tied up with both the concepts of globalisation and neoliberalism, although the exact relationship between these concepts is highly contested (See Kotz 2010). Similar to the term 'globalisation', it has been resistant to any strict agreement of definition among researchers, but nevertheless, a rapid proliferation of studies over the last few decades have deployed the term in analyses of shared observations, indicating the very real necessity felt by scholars to develop new theoretical ground which accounts for distinctive changes within the global financial industry and its relation to the world economy (Engelen 2008: 112). The purpose of this paper is to situate the contemporary political power of finance within these broader historical developments related to processes of financialisation. In so doing, the chapter charts the growing centrality of financial activity within the global economy and unpacks several of the implications this holds for the political power of finance. The paper is divided in two parts. First, I begin by reviewing a selective portion of the financialisation literature which outlines some key strands of thinking and highlights the historic specificity of contemporary financialisation by contrasting it with the financial expansion that occurred in the late 19 th /early 20 th century. In this regard, I closely link the contemporary development of financialisation with shifting socio-economic power configurations that began to take shape as a result of the 1970's stagflation crisis. In the second part of the paper, I extend the discussion to individual processes of financialisation and examine how each of these relates to the growing capacity for political influence by the financial industry. While the focus of the analysis is very much centred on the evolution of the global financial system in advanced economies generally, most of the developments under review emerged primarily from the US financial system -unsurprisingly, given that country's centrifugal economic role and its leading development of a liberalised financial industry.

World Politics, 2013

The wide-ranging varieties of capitalism literature rests on a particular conception of banks and banking that, the authors argue, no longer reflects the reality of modern financial systems. They take advantage of the greater information regarding bank activities revealed by the financial crisis to consider the reality, across eight of the world's largest developed economies, of the financial power of banks to act as bulwarks against market forces. This article offers a market-based banking framework that transcends the bank-based/capital market–based dichotomy that dominates comparative political economy's consideration of financial systems and argues that future CPE research should focus on the activities of banks. By demonstrating how market-based banking increases market influences on the supply of credit, the authors highlight an underap-preciated source of financial market pressure on nonfinancial companies (NFCs) that can have a potential impact across the range of is...

Годишњак за друштвену историју , 2020

Defining the banking elite and its role and importance within the economic and political elite was a process that lasted throughout the twentieth century. The paper gives a brief overview of this process in Europe, while on a very representative example of the Allgemeiner Jugoslawischer Banverein as a large bank of international financial capital, shows how this process went in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and how important it was in modernizing Yugoslav society, especially given that it was the bankers who possessed the knowledge without which economic and financial development and the comprehensive progress of society were not possible. However, this process was accompanied by the strengthening of the bankocracy, whose political activities influenced the business policy of banks, often using them as a tool in party conflicts, but also enabling the unhindered spread of nepotism and corruption in pre-war Yugoslav society.

This paper serves as an introduction to a special issue which explores many new questions, intellectual and political, posed by the current global financial crisis. The aim is to get beyond the convention asking the well-rehearsed questions about what caused the crisis, or why the established theories could not predict it. For we can safely predict that many critical thinkers in political and cultural economy already know, or think they know, the answer to what caused the crisis. This is because they will construct the origins and causes of the within the problematic which they endorsed before the crisis began. Namely, that neoliberalism demarcates the period since 1970 as one of privatisation, liberalisation and support for free markets which essentially takes ideological propositions at their own word and, consequently, fail to distinguish between rhetoric and practice. This special issue explores some new ways of fundamentally reconsidering or challenging established ideas about neoliberalism and finance. For financialisation researchers, the intellectual struggle against organising concepts of neoliberalism and disembedded finance is unfinished business.

Religions, 2019

One of the most formidable socioeconomic challenges which Christian communities are facing today is the growing dominance of neoliberalism. From wheat fields in Brazil to Wall Street in New York City, neoliberalism is marching on everywhere with its massive credit (or credit money). The purpose of this paper is to address a key structural injustice of neoliberalism-the deepening colonization of "social capital" by "financial capital." Since the 1980s, a new economic process known as "financialization" has structurally changed the global economic system entailing an extreme income and wealth gap between the haves and the have nots. It has also rendered a countless number of ordinary people vulnerable to various types of debt entrapment while destroying the environment on a global scale. Behind all these forms of social and natural disintegration lies a crucial neoliberal apparatus fueled by credit. This paper engages in such problems by attempting to reconnect the lost link between social capital and financial capital. In doing so, it first analyzes the genealogical origin of the separation between financial capital and social capital. The author then comes up with ethical principles to re-anchor financial capital in social capital through a critical and interdisciplinary exploration.

Accounting, Economics and Law - a Convivium, 2013

This article argues for a back to basics approach in banking theory and broader comparative and historical perspectives on bank change. Evidence across advanced economies suggests varieties of finance capitalism rather than convergence toward joint stock banks and capital markets through privatizations, liberalization and deregulation. A minimal definition of banks as deposit taking and loan-making institutions suggests that the US experience remains, paradoxically, both paradigm and exception, and that Minskyian approaches both contribute to recent debates about finance and banking and may profit by expanding the scope of analysis to include bank-centered finance abroad.

The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization, 2020

"The Making of Modern Finance is a path-breaking study of the construction of liberal financial governance and demonstrates how complex forms of control by the state profoundly transformed the nature of modern finance. Challenging dominant theoretical conceptions of liberal financial governance in international political economy, this book argues that liberal economic governance is too often perceived as a passive form of governance. It situates the gold standard in relation to practices of monetary governance which preceded it, tracing the evolution of monetary governance from the late middle Ages to show how the 19th century gold standard transformed the way states relate to finance. More specifically, Knafo demonstrates that the institutions of the gold standard helped to put in place instruments of modern monetary policy that are usually associated with central banking and argues that the gold standard was a prelude to Keynesian policies rather than its antithesis. The author reveals that state interventions played a vital role in the rise of modern financial techniques which emerged in the late 18th and 19th century and served as the foundation for contemporary financial systems. Advancing central debates in international political economy about the evolution of the international monetary system, this book will be of very strong interest to students and scholars of international political economy, economic history and historical sociology. It will appeal to those interested in monetary and financial history, the modern state, liberal governance, and varieties of capitalism."

The Economic History Review, 2017