Read Martin Sokol latest article – just published in Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. DOI
If you missed the recent presentations by Geofin’s Martin Sokol, Rodrigo Fernandez, Leonardo Pataccini, Sara Benceković and Zsuzsanna Pósfai at the Global Conference on Economic Geography in Dublin 7-10 June 2022 you can now view the slides from their presentations here Slides
Congratulations to Leonardo Pataccini GEOFIN research fellow, on the publication is his latest work in the Journal of the Balkan Studies. “From post-socialist transition to the COVID-19 crisis: cycles, drivers, and perspectives of subordinate financialization in Latvia”.
This article is available online from: Journal of Baltic Studies
GCEG 2022 Dublin –Special Session 04_09
Financialisation: Disruptions, Displacements and Discontents
Session organisers:
Session description:
Financialisation, a shorthand for the increasing power of finance over society and the economy, continues to reshape economic geographies in numerous ways and at multiple scales. From housing to health care, from education to innovation, from firms to governments, from labour markets to financial markets, from retail banks to central banks, the process of financialisation has fundamentally altered wealth and power relations. In doing so, it has created significant disruptions, displacements and discontents. Financialisation appears to be deepening social and territorial inequalities, while making contemporary capitalist economies more prone to crises which in turn reinforces the concentration of wealth and power among those with financial assets, i.e. the pandemic has worsened economic inequities and strengthened multiple problematic financial mechanisms. Furthermore, the subjugation of economic process to the financialised logic of short-term financial gain accelerates climate change, reinforces fossil fuel reliance, and deepens climate vulnerabilities around the world.
TUESDAY 7th JUNE 2022 – Trinity
Financialisation I: Central banks and monetary policy Chair: Jennie Stephens
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Financialisation II: Climate justice, higher education & neoliberalism Chair: Martin Sokol
WEDNESDAY 8th JUNE 2022 – UCD
Financialisation III: Housing and real estate Chair: Leonardo Pataccini
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Financialisation IV: Hegemony and subordination Chair: Zsuzsanna Pósfai
Conference website: https://www.regionalstudies.org/events/2022-rsa-cee-programme/
Special Session SS05 at the 2022 RSA CEE conference in Leipzig, Germany (14-17 Sept 2022).
Session organisers:
Arguments centred on infrastructure have become increasingly influential across social sciences. While infrastructure is primarily understood as embedded technical support systems that provide services to populations and organizations, social scientists document that infrastructures themselves are integrated into larger ecologies of other infrastructures, social organization, work routines, norms and standards, communities of users etc. (Niewöhner 2017). Infrastructures can be thus seen as extended and technologically mediated material assemblages that continuously produce social and socio-technical relations in both planned and unplanned ways (Harvey et al. 2017). Scholars working on finance deploy the concept as a heuristic for making visible “hard” infrastructures in finance as well as the socio-technical and organizational arrangements and processes surrounding them (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn 2019; Krarup 2019). They further developed the notion of the infrastructural power of finance to draw attention to the ways in which state actors such as central banks and treasuries come to depend on financial actors, markets and practices for the execution of their policies, with obvious implications for regulation (Braun 2020; Gabor and Braun 2020). A related line of enquiry focuses on entanglements between financial infrastructures and security (de Goede 2020), which have been recently taken to a new level with unprecedented sanctions against Russia’s access to particular financial markets, assets or payment systems. This special session invites analyses of these two dimensions of the relationship between infrastructure and finance in Eastern Europe – a region in which this line of enquiry is still underdeveloped, although existing scholarship already points to distinctive financial infrastructures such as foreign-led banking systems.
First, the session invites analyses of the infrastructures of Eastern European finance. The term is interpreted such as to cover a wide range of infrastructural phenomena – technological instruments and systems (e.g. trading platforms, payment systems, credit registries), mechanisms and techniques (e.g. credit scoring, government debt issuance techniques), and institutions and institutional frameworks (e.g. exchanges, markets.).
Second, the session invites reflections on the infrastructural power of finance in the region as well as its limits – the ways in which financial instruments and markets become prerequisites for monetary, security and other policies, but also the ways in which states may reassert their power vis-à-vis finance and deploy it for their purposes.
Financialisation: Disruptions, Displacements and Discontents
Organised by: Leonardo Pataccini, Martin Sokol and Jennie Stephens
This session invites papers that will address financialisation and its disruptions, displacements and discontents, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives and from a variety of scales from the local and regional to the trans-territorial and global. We welcome papers that will cover areas less researched including (but not limited to) the financialisation of banks, financialisation and monetary policy, financialisation of the state, financialisation of higher education, financialisation of nature, financialisation of climate governance, financialisation of energy systems, etc., as well as more established areas such as financialisation of housing & real estate, financialisation of households, and corporate financialisation. We particularly welcome contributions that would explore the links between different areas of financialisation, while considering multidimensional and mutually reinforcing disruptions and displacements caused by financialisation.
To submit your paper please click on the image below:
Organisers:
Rodrigo Fernandez, Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO)
Sara Murawski, The Transnational Institute (TNI)
Leonardo Pataccini, Trinity College Dublin / University of Latvia
Martin Sokol, Trinity College Dublin
For more information on these events: contact Martin Sokol.
These roundtable sessions focus on the most pressing issues related to central banking and monetary policy in contemporary financialized capitalism. The roundtables bring together experts and critical thinkers including scholars and civil society organizations that work on one or more of the following issues:
• Unconventional monetary policy/QE and wealth inequality
• Central banks, democratic deficit and accountability
• Monetary policy and green transition
• Monetary policy, subordinate financialization and core-periphery relations
• Monetary policy and spatial inequality
The aim is to encourage a dialogue between experts in these critical areas and to explore how synergies between different approaches can be achieved.
Theme 1: The monetary future of Europe
How should the European financial infrastructure and monetary policy (in the eurozone and beyond) be re-designed to promote more balanced development between the core and its peripheries (including the East-Central European periphery)? How can this be done to simultaneously support the green transition, social justice and democratic accountability of monetary policy in Europe?
Theme 2: The future of central banking and the global political economy
What a future central banking and international monetary architecture should look like to ensure global financial stability, to promote social & climate justice and to support balanced economic development at the global scale? What are the interlinkages between subordinate financialization and monetary policy?
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Roundtable 1: 15th June 2022. Notes from session
Participants: Uuree Batsaikhan, Marc Beckmann, Sara Bencekovic, Nina Eichacker, Rodrigo Fernandez, Clement Fontan, Katie Kedward, Sara Murawski, Leonardo Pataccini, Martin Sokol, Jens Van ‘T Klooster.
Roundtable 2: 17th June 2022 Notes from session
Participants: Andrea Binder, Annina Kaltenbrunner, Leah Downey, Katie Edward, Nina Eichacker, Roderigo Fermandez, Kardelen Gunaydin, Sara Murawski, Fathimath Musthaq, Leonardo Pataccini, Emily Rosenmann, Martin Sokol, Jennie Stephens.
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Background:
The 2008 global financial crisis transformed leading central banks in the Global North into the ‘masters of the universe’. This dominant position in the global financial system was strengthened further by the monetary interventions initiated during the early period of the Covid-19 shock. Presently, the evolving repercussions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine further highlight the need to examine the international monetary system.
Interventions by leading central banks at times of crises, while stabilizing the system temporarily, come at an enormous cost. Quantitative Easing (QE), for example, has inflated asset prices, including real estate, fueling a rise in wealth inequality not seen since the gilded age. The increase in cross-border financial flows, pushed by QE in the Global North, further solidified the subordinate position of emerging economies in the Global South and deepened uneven development at various spatial scales. The after-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to strengthen these trends and, in doing so, increase the probability of further crises in the near future.
Another crucial set of questions relate to the potential for the greening of the financial system by monetary policy in the face of the climate crisis. Academics and civil society organizations have been successful in formulating caveats and alternatives to the one-dimensional ESG focus pushed forward by the financial services industry, but central banks are slow to bring in radical changes needed to avert the climate disaster. In fact, recent research suggests that the alleged ‘market neutrality’ of QE policies has increased climate change risks.
Related to all the above issues is the question of legitimacy and democratic oversight. While central banks have assumed a center role in the management of contemporary financialised capitalism, including acting as key geo-political agents, they remain largely insulated from democratic decision-making structures.
The proposed Roundtables are designed to facilitate focused discussion on the above set of issues. In particular we are interested in how these different questions and struggles can complement each other and what this means for the future of central banking and the financial architecture more broadly. What would/could/should a blueprint for a democratic, socially just, spatially balanced, and environmentally sustainable central banking of the future look like? How can central banks best position themselves to become the responsible and accountable agents of positive change and transformation? How can a positive change be achieved at the European level and what needs to be done at the global level ?
Prof. Martin Sokol is participating in this year’s virtual (due to Covid-19) meeting of the American Association of Geographers (25 February – 1 March 2022) with a poster presentation entitled ‘Financial chains in financialized economies: the role of central banks’.
For more details and to download a copy of the poster presentation please click on the link below:
GEOFIN Infographic 6 – Financial chains in financialized economies
GEOFIN Researcher Zsuzsanna Pósfai participated in Trade Union Cooperation Forum’s recent conference on in-work poverty. The two-day conference was held on 2-3 December 2021 in Budapest. The Trade Union Cooperation Forum (SZEF) is one of the new federal systems of the Hungarian trade union movement, which was transformed during the political and economic change (1989–90). A trade union association representing employees in public education, health and social care, public collections, cultural and artistic institutions, and employees in the state and municipal administration, the judiciary, and public order and safety agencies. It is one of the largest trade union confederations in Hungary. In 2019, the 13 member organizations of the SZEF registered about 60,000 members.
A recording of the live discussion is available in Hungarian on Facebook.
