Financialisation Working Group

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Events and announcements

IIPPE Financialisation Working Group – Call for papers

14th Annual Conference in Political Economy

“The Changing World Economy, and Today’s Imperialism”

4-7 September 2024 / Kadir Has Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Türkiye

Coordinators: Bruno Bonizzi, Philip Mader, Ezgi Unsal

We welcome proposals for individual research papers, panels and other presentations that relate to the interests of the Financialisation Working Group at IIPPE’s 2024 Annual Conference.

Research on financialisation has entered a mature phase, and a glimpse at the world economy is suggestive of its continuing importance. Ownership and control is ever more concentrated in the hands of large asset managers. From stock markets to public utilities, the provision of key commodities and services is increasingly channelled through financial means.

Nevertheless, the initial conditions in which financialisation flourished, have largely evolved. Crucially, there are clear signs of a much more proactive role for the State, whose relationship with finance varies significantly across time and space. This is against a more turbulent economic backdrop: inflation and interest rates remain high and military conflicts have resurged, and climate change has an ever more visible impact on people’s livelihood. Do these factors signal the end of financialisation? Or will take on a new form?

The Financialisation Working Group welcomes contributions to these issues, especially as they relate to the broader themes of the conference. We are looking for empirical and theoretical contributions and we are especially keen on receiving proposals for organised panels.

The deadline for submissions is the 18th of February. When submitting please indicate you are submitting to the financialisation working group stream. For any questions, please contact Bruno Bonizzi at b.bonizzi@herts.ac.uk

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Check the Money and Development seminar series

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Public Event: Financialisation and the periodisation of capitalism

25th April 2017, 6pm – 8pm: Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS, University of London

As the concept gains prominence within social sciences, debates arise about situating financialisation within the history of capitalism. Is financialisation a contingent product of the economic shifts of the 1970s and 1980s? Is it a long-run tendency of capitalism?

Join us for for a discussion about these issues with Prof. Photis Lysandrou (City University of London), Prof. Simon Mohun (Queen Mary University of London), and Prof. Jan Toporowski (SOAS). The speakers will introduce their different viewpoints and discuss some theoretical implications concerning the incorporation of contextual aspects with respect to space and time, based on questions prepared by the IIPPE Financialisation Working Group. A general Q&A session will follow. The event is open to everyone, and is chaired by Dr Ulrich Volz, head of the department of Economics at SOAS.

Please register through Eventbrite

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IIPPE Financialisation Working Group (FWG) – Call for papers

8th Annual Conference in Political Economy:

The Political Economy of Inequalities and Instabilities in the 21st Century

September 13 – 15, 2017 / Berlin School of Economics and Law

The exponential growth of the financial sector after the end of the Bretton Woods system and its consequent collapse during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, has triggered a broad scholarly debate on finance in general and financialisation in particular. Over the past thirty years, the volume of global financial assets to GDP has risen three times. Financialisation has been used as an umbrella term first, to refer to such increasing volume of financial assets and transactions, the changing structure of financial sector itself along with the creation of new financial products such as Credit Default Swaps (CDSs), Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and associated operations and the increasing importance of financial institutions and actors in general. Second and more specifically, the extensive interdisciplinary research on financialisation has been concerned with the transformation of the functioning of the world economy at both micro and macro levels. Such transformation has been associated with several phenomena such as the impact of shareholder maximization strategies on balance sheet structure of firms, increasing significance of the financial sector relative to the real sector and the implications of these for economic growth as well as the increasing levels of income inequality and household indebtedness.

The eighth Annual Conference of IIPPE focuses on the political economy of inequalities and instabilities in the 21^st century. In accordance with the general call for papers, contributions to the IIPPE FWG may include, but not limited to, proposals dealing with the following key issues:

• Does financialisation relate to the observed high levels of income inequality? How is the relationship observed in developed and developing economies?
• How can finance and financialisation be addressed in the current context of social and economic instabilities? Can financialisation lead to structural economic instability?
• What are the future prospects for the world economy given the primary role of finance? How can appropriate economic and social policies be designed to capture such prominence and its implications?

The conference invites submissions of individual papers and panel discussion proposals. The submission deadline for abstracts is 1 April 2017. Submissions should be done via the Electronic Proposal Form, which you can access through the IIPPE website (http://iippe.org/wp/).

If you have any questions concerning your paper submission, please contact the working group coordinators at iippefinancialisationwg@gmail.com.

For further information, please visit IIPPE website at http://iippe.org/wp/.

Concluding Financialisation

Tuesday 8th November 2016

SOAS

Some conclusions from the EU FP7 Project on

Financialisation, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development

Conference to be held at

Room S312, Paul Webley Wing (North Block of the Senate House)

The School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG, Nearest Underground: Russell Square.

On Tuesday 8 November 2016

Provisional programme

10.00-10.45  Malcolm Sawyer ‘Financialisation and Economic and Social Performance’

10.45-11.15 Ana Santos ‘(De)financialising social well-being’

11.30-12.00 Bruno Bonizzi ‘Financialisation, development and debt’

12.00-12.40 Kate Bayliss title tbc.

12.40-14.00 Lunch

14.00-14.30 Ben Fine ‘The Material Cultures of Financialisation’

14.30-15.00 Terry McKinley title tbc.

15.00-15.30 Mimoza Shabani ‘Comparative financialisation’

15.30-16.00 Christina Laskaridis tbc.

16.00-16.30 Jan Toporowski ‘A Farewell to Financialisation’.

IIPPE FINANCIALISATION WORKING GROUP

Round Table Discussion Series

At the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

(Nearest Underground: Russell Square)

27th November 2014.

(SOAS Main Building, Room: 273. Time: 17:00 – 19:00)

Ben Fine on “Financialisation from a Marxist perspective”.

Reading: Fine, B (2013-14) “Financialisation From a Marxist Perspective”. In: International Journal of Political Economy, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 5–18.

20th January 2014.

(SOAS Main Building, Room: RS T102. Time: 17:00 – 19:00)

Thomas Marois on “Financialisation, state theory, class, and alternatives to financial capitalism”

Readings: Marois, T (2012) “Finance, finance capital and financialization”. In: Fine, B., Saad-Filho, A., Boffo, M. (2012) The Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA.

Marois, T. (2014) ‘Banking on Alternatives’. In: Marois, T. and Pradella, L. (2014) (ed.) Polarising Development: Alternatives to Neoliberalism and the Crisis. Pluto Press.

Financialisation Working Group Social Hub

The Financialisation Working Group (FWG) will be presenting at the IIPPE Conference 2014 in Naples a record of 62 papers and 17 panels. Reviewing these panels and papers, we have noticed that many dimensions of financialisation have been addressed, such as the impact of finance on public finance, banking, state, housing, wages, emerging economies, global finance, the Eurozone, crisis, food, agriculture, gender, production, social reproduction and so on.

The variety of subjects is exciting and gives us the opportunity to discuss several aspects of political economy with a common emphasis on finance. Furthermore, it brings to our attention why financialisation is crucial for “addressing the nature of contemporary capitalism” (IIPPE). Simultaneously, the challenge is to develop an inclusive and comprehensive definition of the term, as well as to address corresponding policies and applied issues that are absent in the literature and need to be located and explored.

On this basis, please join us for the Financialisation Working Group social hub to chat about financialisation from this rich and extended perspective, highlighting the need for an answer for what is financialisation, the alternative policies and issues that have not been covered by the literature yet, and the aspects of financialisation that you are interested in. Most importantly, join us for this social hub so we can get familiarized with each other’s works, share our thoughts on how Economics and other Social Sciences are dealing with financialisation, and think about joint-activities in which we can promote and discuss the Political Economy of Financialisation locally and internationally.

Bring your lunch with you and meet us on 17th September at 13:20h at the Università degli studi di Napoli L’Orientale, Palazzo del Mediterraneo, room 1.4, first floor.

We are looking forward to seeing many of you.

Financialisation Working Group

The Fifth Annual Conference in Political Economy.

Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy

 16 to 18 September, 2014

Over the last three decades developed and developing economies have gone through significant structural transformations under the ever increasing influence of finance. In critical political economy, the resultant mode of accumulation, and its corresponding social effects, have been analysed under the heading of financialisation and neoliberalism.  Whether the financial crisis that started in 2008 was the end or only an interruption to financialisation  and/or neoliberalism, its costs are still borne by governments and the general public.

The International Initiative of Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) organises its Fifth Annual Conference in Political Economy. The conference will be held at Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Naples, Italy, from 16 to 18 September, 2014 and the theme of the conference is“The Crisis: Scholarship, Policies, Conflicts and Alternatives”.

The IIPPE Financialisation Working Group intends to coordinate panels exploring the implications of financialisation on different aspects of the current crises. In our capacity as convenors of the IIPPE Working Group on Financialisation, we would like to encourage you to submit proposals for individual papers or complete panel to the Working Group for consideration for the Fourth International Conference in Political Economy. In accordance with the general call for papers, contributions could include, but are not limited to:

·       Financialisation of Middle Income Countries; the integration of Middle Income Countries into the global finance with the increasing international capital flows; manifestations and consequences of financialisation in emerging countries.

·       Financialisation of commodities; the increasing growth of commodity index investment and changes in the social relations along commodity chains.

·       Financialisaton of households and income distribution; unequal market and social power relations between classes with the increasing dependence on financial forms of meeting the needs of social reproduction.

·       Limitations of mainstream economic theory and; the role and use of alternative critical studies and methodology in financialisation theory

·       The evolution of financialisation after the crisis, the future of the Euro;  economic analysis of and policy alternatives for social policy as well as transforming financial regulations and international banking reforms

·       Financialisation, the state and conflicts across classes during the recent economic crisis and the ensuing global recession

We would particularly like to encourage the submission of panel proposals (2-4 presentations). Panels, which collectively present the work of institutions or other academic groups, provide an excellent opportunity to showcase work in a greater depth than is possible in single presentations. It is further hoped that the conference will provide an opportunity to deepen links between groups working on finance from a critical perspective.

Abstracts of individual papers (max. 500 words) or panel proposals (max. 500 words plus abstracts of the individual papers) should be submitted to serdar_sengul@soas.ac.uk by24^th March 2014.

Ankara International Research Workshop

14-15 September 2009

Given the theme of the workshop, The Crisis, Interdisciplinarity and Alternatives, it is not surprising that those presenting papers on finance made up a significant proportion of the participants in Ankara. Over the course of four panels, 20 papers were presented which ranged widely in both theoretical content and geographical focus.

Turkey was well represented on the finance panels, with papers examining the instability that ensued following to the neo-liberal reforms of the 1980s, and the effects of the entry of foreign banks into the Turkish financial systems. These papers drew on a range of theoretical concepts, emphasising aspects of the Turkish economy such as generation of fictitious capital, dependency and the destabilising effects of liquidity preference.

Other papers presented at the workshop examined areas such as exchange rate dynamics, central banking, monetary theory and international accounting regulation. Latin America provided the focus for a number of empirical investigations, with papers on Brazil, Argentina and Peru.

Finally, special mention should be given to the presence at the conference of a most distinguished participant: Professor Alessandro Vercelli of Sienna University gave a highly pertinent presentation on the classification scheme used in the the theoretical framework of Hyman Minsky, and in particular the near-ubiquitous use of the phrase Minksy moment since the onset of the financial crisis. Minsky’s name has been heard a lot in recent months, but few are better placed to comment on the relevance of his work than Professor Vercelli.

Aside from the formal presentations, the workshop also provided an excellent opportunity to deepen the links between those engaging in heterodox research on finance, and in particular for discussion on the future activities of the IIPPE Financialisation Working Group. A number of areas for future activity were selected, included compiling an annotated reading list on the financial crisis and developing countries, and the launch of a working paper series.