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T HE money allocated to defence is a critical element in a country’s ability to defend itself and field effective military forces. As with all policy areas, like health, education or social care, adequate resources are a prerequisite for satisfactory performance. In this case, however, headline figures for defence expenditure are also notoriously imprecise measures of military capability. Spending public money on defence is no guarantee that a country can deploy first-class armed forces. And since
3 Debt, land and money: from Polanyi to the new economic archaeology Michael Hudson Inspiration for The Great Transformation in the post-war monetary breakdown Karl Polanyi’s formative years in the aftermath of the First World War were a period of monetary turmoil. The United States became a creditor nation for the first time, and demanded payment of the war debts that Keynes warned were unpayable without wrecking Europe’s financial systems. (Hudson, [1972] 2003 summarizes this era.) France and Britain subjected Germany to unsustainably high reparation debts
? Wherever I have advised on independence, money has come up – though, perhaps surprisingly, not as the first issue. It is probably easier not to think about the prosaic issues and focus on the romantic side of things in order to build momentum and gain backing. But the question of money cannot be ignored. It’s like everything else – you can’t have a champagne lifestyle on a beer budget. So, how does it
4 Commodified money and crustacean nations1 Radhika Desai Polanyi’s ‘great transformation’ refers to the ‘collapse’ of ‘nineteenth century civilization’ and the emergence from it of a vastly different one. The story revolved around the unfolding consequences of the commodification of three fictitious commodities: land, labour and money. However, the consequences of the commodification of the last structured the dramatic plot of The Great Transformation (TGT). Though the gold standard, the apex structure commodifying money, was only one of four institutions
This book begins with a recapitulation of the main themes of Strange's earlier Casino Capitalism, stressing the major policy decisions and non-decisions that, in her opinion, had first allowed financial markets seemingly to outgrow governmental control. It adds a number of newer systemic developments that had emerged in the years after Casino Capitalism was published. Following this opening tour d'horizon, the book evaluates many of these developments in greater detail, covering the revolution in information technology interstate politics, contagion risks, global debt, money laundering and the roles of both national governments and multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and Bank for International Settlements. Great emphasis is placed on the relationship between the United States and Japan, the 'US-Japan axis', which is considered crucial to the effective management of financial crises. All the strings of Strange's discussion are pulled together where she turns her eyes to the future. Most financial research at the time seemed biased toward midlevel theory building, focusing primarily on key relationships within a broader structure whose characteristics were assumed, normally, to be given and stable. The book discusses hypotheses about the most important changes that have affected the global financial system and the international political economy. Key decisions, or non-decisions in the case of failures to act when positive action would have been possible, are also discussed.
Shifts in productive forces have imparted a qualitatively new character to the capitalist economy in the twenty-first century. 1 The changes in the nature of commodities and the market have been discussed above; in this chapter, we will focus on the changes in the monetary and financial spheres. We will discuss the problem of transformation of the money under capitalism, from the form of credit money, serving the circulation of commodity capital, to money reflecting the prevalence of virtual
Chapter 8 Managing mad money – national systems There are two reasons for regulating the behaviour of international financial dealers and the conduct of international financial markets. One is to moderate and restrain greed. The other is to moderate and restrain fear. Greed and fear are the two human emotions most evident in the day-to-day behaviour of the international financial system today. Mad money is the result. Either dealers are drawn by greed to take too big risks with their own or, more often, with other people’s money; or they are overcome by fear
5 All out of money 1976–77 There is a difference between being a charitable benefactor and host to a parasite. William Simon’s explanation of US policy towards Britain during the IMF crisis1 Introduction Allegedly suffering from the first stages of Alzheimer’s disease, Harold Wilson announced he would resign as prime minister in March 1976. As one close associate of the prime minister recalled, Wilson had simply ‘had enough’.2 A battle for the party leadership (and thus to become prime minster) ensued which the ‘champion of the moderates’ James Callaghan
including refugees in mainstream financial services, refugee financial transactions are hived off into separate, closed and second-rate financial systems. Where access to mainstream finance could be helpful for sustaining a livelihood (as with Kenya’s ubiquitous mobile money system), financial encampment becomes one more hurdle for refugees to jump in their attempts to earn a living in spite of a restrictive policy environment. Kenya and Jordan are helpful locations to study the
imaginary in which anyone from anywhere in the world can make money online by simply joining a platform ( Kaurin, 2020 ). The problem is that such disintermediation produces myriad barriers for a wide range of marginalised populations, such as refugees. These include barriers to access such as the high costs of information and communications technology (ICT) ownership, a lack of internet access or limited digital skills ( Foster et al. , 2019 : 57). But