Neoliberal Entrenchment of North Atlantic Capital. From Corporate Self-Regulation to State Capture

After the financial crisis of 2007–8, neoliberal capitalism by all appearances has entrenched instead of being displaced. Its political–economic programme or ‘comprehensive concept of control’ continues to hold society in thrall. This was different in the crisis of 1974–5 when the corporate liberalism of the postwar years and its industry-centred class compromise were beginning to be replaced by finance-led neoliberalism and a compromise with asset-owning middle classes. Under corporate liberalism, real capital accumulation was protected from the ‘rentier’/‘money-dealing’ fraction of capital associated with speculative investment; neoliberalism has allowed its resurgence. Large corporations in the first phase of the transition (‘systemic neoliberalism’) embarked on a strategy of transnational restructuring no longer dependent on 1960s-style state support. In the process, financial group formation, here measured by dense director interlocks (≥2) amongst the largest corporations in the North Atlantic economy (where this type of corporate governance obtains), was intensified. The resurgence of money-dealing capital and rentier incomes in the 1990s led to a decline in real accumulation (‘predatory neoliberalism’), and after the crisis of 2007–8, to a demise of the financial group structure of Atlantic capital as the network of dense interlocks radically thins out and capital comes to rely on states again, this time to protect it from a democratic correction of the neoliberal regime and with state autonomy greatly reduced by public debt.     

The Irish Newspapers and the Residential Property Price Boom

There has already been some academic discussion of the role of the Irish newspapers in fuelling the country's residential property boom that crashed in 2008. Several academic commentators have argued that the newspapers intentionally talked up the Irish market because of the conflicts of interest that they faced, particularly arising from advertising and their organisational linkages. This paper argues that these factors have only limited explanatory value, and that the key determinant in the economics sections of the newspapers was their reliance on external expertise to augment their analyses. The article presents quantitative data demonstrating the enormous prevalence of articles written by and citing private-sector economists from organisations with direct stakes in the property market. These commentators were very unlikely to issue unreserved warnings about a crash, and in many cases made unduly positive forecasts with little empirical justification. The article argues that the key fault of the newspapers therefore lay in the failure of management to prevent the tone and coverage of the market from being skewed by external interests. The article contributes to the broader international literature on media bias and the role of external experts.     

Feeding (On) Geopolitical Anxieties: Asian Appetites,News Media Framing and the 2007–2008 Food Crisis

This paper analyses the role of news media in (re)producing geopolitical narratives of food insecurity in relation to the 2007–2008 global food price spike. News content and textual analysis suggests that the media’s representation of the food price spike is partly framed by Western geopolitical anxieties of the ‘threatening rise of Asia’, and features ‘fast growing’ Asian appetites among the main culprits of the crisis. Seeking to explain the widespread circulation of such representation, this paper analyses media-source relationship within the context of market-driven journalism, and suggests that the changing role of news media has in turn contributed to a rapid and uncritical circulation of elite-based interpretation of, and neoliberal geopolitical approach to, food security. The paper points at the importance of critical enquiries into geopolitical representations of food insecurity and of opening media space for a ‘counter-geopolitics of food security’.     

Housing booms and media coverage

This article analyses news media coverage of the housing market. Building on theories of media influence where word of mouth is the final mechanism of opinion change but media initiate discourse, I examine the relationship between news media and the recent UK house price boom. Over 30 000 articles on the UK housing market from the period 1993 to 2008 are analysed, and it is found that media Granger-caused real house price changes, suggesting the media may have influenced opinions on the housing market. However, media sentiment on the housing market did not change with the secular increase in house prices in the 2000s, suggesting that the media did not contribute to the UK’s housing boom and may have helped constrain it.     

Social Network Analysis: Suggested Applications to Economic Control

The current crisis reveals the inadequacy of laissez faire policies of the last 30 years, and the neoliberal theories upon which they rest. The policies directed toward averting depression have largely benefited the corporate rentier and the financial sector they served. Keynes, Minsky, and Galbraith advocated policies to rescue the economy, NOT the rentier. Keynes hoped to make capital sufficiently abundant so as to euthanize the rentier. Minsky attributes their endurance to the public's effort to emulate their consumptive habits. Galbraith points to the use of corporate power to stimulate consumer spending and influence the political process.     

A Monstrous Hybrid: The Political Economy of Housing in Early Twenty-first Century Sweden

In the leftist Western political imagination, Sweden continues, for many, to represent a vision of a ‘better’, more egalitarian political-economic model than the neoliberal capitalism that has come to dominate the Anglo-American world in particular; and its housing system is widely regarded as an integral component of this alternative, social-democratic model. The present paper argues that this envisioning of the political economy of Swedish housing is thoroughly outdated. Yet it insists, equally, that the competing envisioning of Swedish housing advanced by prominent scholars within Sweden – of a radically (neo)liberalised domestic housing system – is not accurate either. Rather, Swedish housing in the early twenty-first century constitutes a complex hybrid of legacy regulated elements on the one hand and neoliberalised elements on the other. Recognising this hybridity is essential, the paper submits, to understanding the nature and source of the most pressing issues facing the Swedish housing sector today. The system's hybridity, moreover, is ‘monstrous’ – following Jane Jacobs's coining of the term – in the sense that those issues reveal the pivotal role currently played by the Swedish housing system in the creation, reproduction and intensification of socio-economic inequality.     

Neoliberal growth models,monetary union and the Euro crisis. A post-Keynesian perspective

The paper offers an account of the Euro crisis based on post-Keynesian monetary theory and its typology of demand regimes. Neoliberalism has transformed social and financial relations in Europe but it has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process. Instead, growth has relied either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). In Europe the financial crisis has been amplified by an economic policy architecture (the Stability and Growth Pact) that aimed at restricting the role of fiscal policy and monetary policy. This neoliberal economic policy regime in conjunction with the separation of monetary and fiscal spheres has turned the financial crisis of 2007 into a sovereign debt crisis in southern Europe.     

The Corporate Elite Community Structure of Global Capitalism

A key debate on the merits and consequences of globalisation asks to what extent we have moved to a multipolar global political economy. Here we investigate this issue through the properties and topologies of corporate elite networks and ask: what is the community structure of the global corporate elite? In order to answer this question, we analyse how the largest one million firms in the world are interconnected at the level of corporate governance through interlocking directorates. Community detection through modularity maximisation reveals that regional clusters play a fundamental role in the network architecture of the global political economy. Transatlantic connections remain particularly strong: Europe and North America remain interconnected in a dense network of shared directors. A distinct Asian cluster stands apart as separate and oriented more towards itself. While it develops and gains economic and political power, Asia remains by and large outside the scope of the networks of the incumbent global (that is, North Atlantic) corporate elite. We see this as a sign of the rise of competing corporate elites. But the corporate elites from the traditional core countries still form a powerful opponent for any competing faction in the global corporate elite.     

高管政治关联助推公司媒体报道了吗?—来自民营企业IPO期间的证据

媒体报道对资产定价具有重要影响,致使其日益受到公司管理层的重视.文章以2006?2014年民营企业IPO为样本,基于公司管理层经历或背景,研究高管政治关联对公司媒体披露的影响及其市场效应.研究发现:(1)高管政治关联有助于公司在IPO期间获得更高的媒体关注度和更正面的报道倾向;而且,政治关联层级越高,媒体报道对其越有利.(2)高管政治关联对媒体报道的影响主要通过非证监会四大信息披露媒体和地理邻近媒体来实现的;而地区制度环境可在一定程度上抑制高管政治关联对媒体报道的影响.(3)由政治关联所带来的媒体报道水平的改善,有助于促进IPO首日抑价的上升;但中长期会导致股价反转.文章不仅丰富了公司治理对媒体(信息)披露管理影响方面的文献,而且为民营企业的政商关系研究提供了新的经验证据.     

Power,Intergroup Conflicts and Social Stratification in the United States: What has the Global Crisis Taught us?

Abstract

Drawing on early sociological analyses of how power and intergroup conflicts can affect the development of modern economies, this paper investigates how the recent Global Crisis (GC) has affected the stratification of the US society. The paper argues that the consumerist society has reinforced the historical stratification of social identities with white men in high-paid, high-social status managerial and financial occupations at the top, and black women in low-paid, low-status service occupations at the bottom. This paper calls for a deconstruction of the neoliberal individual into a unique combination of identities in a stratified capitalist society in order to reveal how social stratification has evolved during the GC. The paper finally concludes on the importance of heterogeneous identities in reflecting the diversity of societal and economic interests in order to address the issues of financial stability and sustainability at the corporate and societal levels.     

Ukraine and the Big Moral Divide: What Biased Media Coverage Means to East European Borders

ABSTRACT

Geopolitical shifts and the changing significance of borders in the EU’s neighbourhood are usually understood as a matter of international power politics. Factors that accompany geopolitical impact on borders, such as media coverage of geopolitical change, often appear as secondary or irrelevant. However the recent Ukraine conflict revealed the contrary as pro-EU attitudes were strongly supported by ‘western’ media. Therefore this paper seeks to clarify the role of news media in creating perspectives and attitudes on geopolitical shifts and the significance of European borders. Empirical evidence on the coverage of the evolving Ukraine crisis by German news sources portrays the media as promoters of biased framings and imaginaries which suggest that the EU be a potential conflict party in the newly evolving geostrategic confrontation in its eastern neighbourhood. The findings indicate that during critical periods of the Ukraine crisis media reports combined rising euphoria about Europe and ‘the West’, as defenders of the ‘good cause’, with excessive moral polarising and the discursive normalisation of a rhetoric of escalation. Imaginaries of a bipolar world (The West against Russia) and a new Cold War prepared the ground for a new understanding of European borders and neighbourhood relations as being manipulable at will.     

Neoliberal and neostructuralist perspectives on labour flexibility,poverty and inequality: A critical appraisal

Numerous recent reports by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and international organisations have focused on so-called ‘climate refugees’. This article examines the turn from a discourse of ‘climate refugees’, in which organisations perceive migration as a failure of both mitigation and adaptation to climate change, to one of ‘climate migration’, in which organisations promote migration as a strategy of adaptation. Its focus is the promotion of climate migration management, and it explores the trend of these discourses through two sections. First, it provides an empirical account of the two discourses, emphasising the differentiation between them. It then focuses on the discourse of climate migration, its origins, extent and content, and the associated practices of ‘migration management’. The second part argues that the turn to the promotion of ‘climate migration’ should be understood as a way to manage the insecurity created by climate change. However, international organisations enacts this management within the forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the framework of governance. Therefore, the promotion of ‘climate migration’ as a strategy of adaptation to climate change is located within the tendencies of neoliberalism and the reconfiguration of southern states' sovereignty through governance.     

The Rise of Finance and the Decline of Organised Labour in the Advanced Capitalist Countries

The goal of this article is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the impacts of finance and corporate governance reforms on organised labour since 1980. The argument is made that contemporary institutional and ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ as well as ‘Varieties of Unionism’ perspectives on labour market reform have overstated the power of states, institutions and organised interests in deflecting global economic pressures. Drawing on a range of recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics and qualitative studies, it is claimed that current developments in finance and corporate governance mark a fundamental break with post-war developments. Capital has reasserted its power over organised labour and labour markets not only in the US and UK, but throughout Western Europe as well. In assessing how far this reversal has gone, the article focuses on three key political economic changes: i) the rise in finance and adoption of corporate ‘shareholder’ systems; ii) the expansion of mergers and acquisitions and their negative effects on unionisation and manufacturing jobs; and iii) the effects of financial pressures and corporate reform on collective bargaining and wages. This is the first study to report on comparative changes and qualitative reforms to both finance and labour in 13 OECD countries between 1980 and 2005.     

Mass Media Competition, Political Competition, and Public Policy

If better informed voters receive favourable policies, then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting. This paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups. The increasing-returns-to-scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups, such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests, and groups that are valuable to advertisers. This news bias alters the trade-off in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy. The paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics. The model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters.     

Comparative Analysis of Thresholds of Non-Revolutionary Institutional Change: China and the United States in the 1980s

Ireland has experienced a series of interlocking banking, fiscal, unemployment, and political crises since 2007. We detail the challenges involved in modeling individual moments of the crisis through the lens of balance sheets and transactions matrices among sectors of the Irish society. We conclude with a series of recommendations for models of small open economies.     

The Confidence Trap: Japan’s Past Bubble and China’s Recent Bubble

This paper explores the origin of China’s recent credit and asset boom by comparing it with the Japanese bubble economy in the late 1980s by focusing on the asymmetric pattern of financial liberalisation under high savings. It argues that (1) both cases show a ‘confidence trap’ in that policy-makers of the government shared a complacent mindset that they can achieve the optimal mix of market liberalisation and repression, while believing that their political economic system is fundamentally different from others; (2) Such complacent confidence precipitated the supply-side driven financial reforms, in which both governments tried to diversify the credit channels of bank deposits by promoting non-bank financial intermediaries; (3) Exogenous shocks played a pivotal role in enforcing the government to take aggressive monetary easing and fiscal expansionary measures. But the Chinese case is different from the Japanese case in that (1) local politics has promoted a ‘too secure to fail’ situation in which rent-seeking activities are difficult to be detected, thus aggravating the hidden systemic risks; (2) China needs to liberalise its capital account with the more strengthened macroprudential regulatory governance, as the global foreign exchange markets have drastically changed from the period of the 1980s.     

The Positive Externalities of Chapter 13 “Cramdowns” Could Prevent the Next Foreclosure Crisis

Revision of Bankruptcy Code 11 U.S.C. § 1322(b)(2) would permit “cramdowns” wherein bankruptcy judges would administer the modification of residential mortgages only when mortgage-lending abuses were most rampant (a real estate bubble). Foreclosure spill-over effects systemically worsened the housing crisis and were not evenly diffused throughout the broader housing market. Throughout 2003–2006, an oversupply of underpriced mortgage finance emanating from lax underwriting standards bid up residential prices. Relaxation of underwriting protocols came about from the mortgage market’s institutional swing from regulated agency securitization (predominantly government-sponsored enterprises “GSEs”) to unregulated securitization (shadow banking). This resulted in an untenable residential-price bubble as synthetically inexpensive credit from investors’ mispricing amplified mortgage demand, while greater mortgage quantity nudged up housing prices. The result was a self-referential cycle of waning residential prices supporting and perpetuating nigh incessant foreclosures: the bubble had burst. Cramdowns would incentivize lenders to be less inclined to loosen underwriting standards, or when done, to include this factor in the risk premium of the cost of credit. Enhancing Chapter 13 with the muscle to alter residential mortgages would ameliorate an institutionally structural issue endemic to the past (and upcoming?) foreclosure crisis.     

Multilateral Organisations and the Limits to International Energy Cooperation

Surging world energy prices, increasing oil market volatility and a nascent ‘energy transition’ are posing major challenges for global energy governance. In response, there has been a proliferation in the number of multilateral bodies addressing energy issues in recent years, and a wide range of organisations now claim a role in facilitating intergovernmental energy cooperation. However, the practical achievements of these organisations have been very poor, with all suffering difficulties that have limited their ability to promote shared energy interests between states. This article examines the dynamics of multilateral energy organisations, arguing that the political economy features of energy – securitisation and attendant patterns of economic nationalism – explain why they have failed to develop more robust cooperative mechanisms. Ten global-level organisations are evaluated and found to suffer from membership, design or commitment issues that limit their effectiveness in global energy governance. These challenges are linked to the securitisation of energy, which has led governments to favour low-cost soft-law approaches over potentially more effective hard-law institutional designs. Moreover, the securitisation of energy poses limits for how far multilateral energy cooperation can proceed and means that contemporary efforts to strengthen these organisations are unlikely to succeed in coming years.     

Imagining the European Economy: 'Competitiveness' and the Social Construction of 'Europe' as an Economic Space

This article analyses the political and ideological agency of an emergent European transnational capitalist class in the socioeconomic governance of the European Union (EU) by examining the case of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT). It seeks to show that the ERT‐as an elite forum mediating the interests and power of the most transnationalise d segments of European capital‐has played a significant role in shaping European governance in as much as it has successfully articulated and promoted ideas and concepts thathave at critical times set the political agenda and, beyond, have helped to shape the discourse within which European policy making is embedded. Here, the increasingly neoliberal orientation of the ERT reflects, and at the same time is a constitutive element within, the construction of a new European order in which governance is geared to serve the interests of a globalising transnational capitalist elite, and hence the exigencies of global 'competitiveness'. Although in recent years some detailed work has been done on the role of the ERT in the internal market programme, there has as yet been little attention paid to (and thus interpretation of) the content of the ideas promoted by the ERT and hence to the ideological power that this forum of transnational capitalists exercises. The article is divided into four main parts. The first briefly elaborates the theoretical framework that informs my analysis. Drawing upon what has come to be labelled the 'neo-Gramscian school' in International Relations (IR), I willadvance a historical materialist understanding of the dynamics of European integration, emphasising in particular the role of transnational social forces‐as engendered by the capitalist production process‐in the political and ideological struggles over European order. The second part introduces the case of the European Round Table. I will claim that the ERT is neither a simple business lobby nor a corporatist interest association, but must rather be interpreted as having developed into an elite platform for an emergent European transnational capitalist class from which it can formulate a common strategy and‐on the basis of that strategy‐seek to shape European socioeconomic governance through its privileged access to the European institutions. It is this latter role of the ERT that will be the focus of the final two parts. As such, the third presents an analysis of the evolution of ERT's strategic project and the initiating role the Round Table played in the relaunching of the integration process from Europe 1992 to Maastricht. Following this, the fourth part will analyse the ideological orientation and strategic outlook of today's Round Table and its current role in shaping what I will call the neoliberal discourse of competitiveness which, I argue, increasingly underpins European governance.     

Information and adjustment in a local housing market

Existing studies on bubbles have been mainly concerned with investigating the stationarity properties of stock prices and market fundamentals. We develop a new method of testing for bubbles that relates the bubble component of stock prices to the probability of bursting in the context of the Weibull distribution. There were several eruptions and subsequent collapses of seeming bubbles over the past three decades: 1987 (Black Monday), 2000 (information technology (IT) boom) and 2007 (housing market boom). Using US monthly data for the S&P 500 and NASDAQ series, we have found that the S&P 500 series contained an explosive bubble only during the boom of the housing market that occurred before the 2007 global economic crisis, and the NASDAQ market contained an explosive bubble during the surge of stock prices peaking in 1987 and 2007, although our stationarity tests fail to detect the bubbles. No bubble was found in both the S&P and NASDAQ series during the 2000 IT boom. Our evidence corroborates the criticism that the traditional unit root and cointegration tests may not be able to detect some important class of bubbles.