Wednesday, 30 August 2023, 5pm UK time / 6pm CEST
Kai Koddenbrock is a professor of political economy at Bard College and leads a research group on “Monetary and Economic Sovereignty in West Africa” at the “Africa Multiple” Cluster of Excellence at Bayreuth University, Germany. His research focuses on global hierarchies, financial dependencies, and questions of self-determination.
Benjamin Braun is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany. His research focuses on the political economy of financial and monetary systems.
Discussants:
Johannes Jäger, Professor and Head of Department for Economics at the University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna
Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Liverpool
The book is available here: https://www.routledge.com/Capital-Claims-Power-and-Global-Finance/Braun-Koddenbrock/p/book/9781032111193
Abstract
Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance analyses how global financialized capitalism operates and reproduces itself, exploring the remarkable ability of the financial sector to maintain its dominance through even the most severe economic crises. The book defines international financialization as a process by which the number and value, the tradability, and the enforceability of cross-border financial claims increase and are successfully defended against competing social or political agendas. By focusing on financial claims, the volume develops a conceptual toolkit for the study of the political economy of global finance and the inequalities it sustains. The book brings together leading researchers whose work is geared towards opening the black box of cross-border finance. The authors suggest shifting the analytical focus from capital flows to capital claims – credit–debt relations between identifiable actors, embedded in social and political institutions, and infused with power and hierarchy. They show how financial actors wield leverage power, infrastructural power, and enforcement power, both vis-à-vis other private actors and vis-à-vis the state.
Critical Political Economy Research Network (RN06) 