As blockchain technologies are discussed in their political dimensions, this paper questions the political implications of developments in decentralized finance (DeFi). It looks at the ways that DeFi projects refer to game theory as a template for designing the integration of off-chain financial processes into on-chain processes. DeFi’s reference to game theory carries normative understandings of social coordination that oscillate between (liberal) cooperation and (neo-liberal) non-cooperation and defection. This is evidenced in the ways that DeFi installs fundamental uncertainty as well as the reliability of participants’ information, as the key resource for modeling social coordination. While referring to a libertarian notion of ‘collective intelligence, ’ the models tend to involve participants in high-stake transactions under conditions of uncertainty. These results have consequences for the social studies of finance more generally: The prominence of game theory in DeFi indicates that the performativity of economic theory, often depicted in the ways that theory-derived models enable pricing calculation and the transformation of uncertainty into risk, may also result in the celebration of radical uncertainty as a resource of strategic action.
<p>The suburbs of Tokyo Metropolis are experiencing path-dependent, multifaceted shrinkage in socio-demographic, economic, and political and administrative (including fiscal) dimensions. The following two contradictory processes taking place in the opposite direction are at work, namely: the political and administrative decentralization of authority and responsibility (although without much fiscal devolution), and the socio-demographic, economic, and fiscal recentralization of workplaces, residences, and municipal finance. As Tokyo’s suburbs confront these contradictory processes of decentralization and recentralization, they fall into the gap between, on the one hand, policies that prioritize the internationally competitive metropolitan center by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and, on the other hand, policies that address the growing problems of lagging provinces by the Government of Japan. These phenomena are affecting radical, but barely visible, changes in public affairs of municipal governments on the lowest tier. We thus examine the emerging modalities of intra- and inter-municipal affairs in Tokyo’s shrinking post-suburbs. First, we explore the intra-municipal upheavals, incorporating instabilities and disarrays, of ideas and practices inside a municipal government. Next, we investigate the inter-municipal upheavals that involve oscillations between unification and fragmentation among municipal governments. These interrelated intra- and inter-municipal upheavals hinder the consistency and timeliness of planning and decision-making in the local arena. In conclusion, we emphasize the importance of taming these upheavals and creating integrated governance systems by exploiting the emerging sense of the increasingly intertwined future among municipal governments. This is vital to strengthen local solidarity and promote inter-municipal collaborations at scales that can ensure metropolitan and suburban sustainability.</p>
Abstract While contemporary technological disruption is increasingly conceptualized in terms of the logic and paradoxes of the digital platform economy, discussions of FinTech have only engaged to a limited extent with these debates—particularly from an economic geographic standpoint. This chapter fills this gap by extending the Global Financial Network (GFN) framework to problematize the organizational and geographic logic of the digital platform economy in finance, and applying it to examine the impact of the digital platform model on asset management. It shows that asset management is being profoundly disrupted by what we dub digital asset management platforms—or DAMPs—which encompass services including index fund and ETF provision, robo-advising, and analytics and trading support. Like other digital platforms, DAMPs do not so much leverage technology to enhance their competitiveness within markets, as to radically restructure the market itself. Also, like other platforms, their rise has produced a winner-take-all paradox of centralization through democratization that defies predictions of technology-enabled industry decentralization. However, the logic and implications of the rise of DAMPs diverges, in other respects, from nonfinancial digital platforms, as finance has long possessed an informational intensity and regulatory and organizational fluidity characteristic of the digital platform economy. Consequently, the digital platform model has mostly developed endogenously in asset management through incremental innovation by major financial firms—in a process that has reinforced the position of leading incumbent asset management centers, and above all New York—rather than being introduced from the outside by upstart technology firms and clusters.
Finansallaşma, kapitalizmin son kırk yıllık dönüşümünü açıklayan önemli kavramlardan biridir. Dijital ve finansal alanda yaşanan gelişmeler dikkate alındığında, teknoloji ile finansallaşma arasında güçlü bir bağ bulunmaktadır. Yüzyılın başından bu yana hızla yükselen büyük teknoloji şirketlerinin iş modelleri, dijital ve finansal alanı giderek daha fazla bütünleştirmektedir. Bu bağlamda, dijital ve finansal alanların bütünleşmesi, finansallaşma literatüründe dijital finansallaşma olarak tanımlanan yeni bir kavram ortaya çıkarmıştır. Finansal alandaki dönüşüme öncülük eden dijitalleşme, 2008 yılı itibariyle dijital dönüşümün yeni aşaması olan blok zincir teknolojisi ve kripto para piyasalarını finansal sisteme dâhil etmiştir. Blok zincir teknolojisinin yeni finansal iş modelleri ve kripto para piyasaları, oldukça yeni ve dinamik bir alandır. Ancak, farklı iş modellerinin her biri finansallaşma çatısı altında birleşmektedir. Finansal dijitalleşmenin önemli parçaları olarak blok zincir teknolojisi ve yeni finansal iş modellerinin finansallaşma bağlantıları litertürde ihmal edilmiştir. Bu makale, blok zincir teknolojisinin yeni finansal iş modellerini ve kripto para piyasalarını dijital finansallaşma kavramı üzerinden ele almakta ve betimleyici analiz yöntemiyle incelemektedir. Makalenin amacı, kripto para piyasalarının finansallaşma bağlantılarını ortaya koymak ve dijital finansallaşma kavramını blok zincir teknolojisini de kapsayacak biçimde genişletmektir. Elde edilen bulgulara göre, blok zincir teknolojisi dijital verileri herhangi bir üretim ilişkisine dâhil olmadan doğrudan kripto para formuna dönüştürerek finansallaşmasını sağlamaktadır. Blok zincir teknolojisi ve yeni finansal iş modelleri, kripto paralar eliyle dijital ve finansal alanları bütünleştirdiği ölçüde finansallaşma alanını genişletmekte ve derinleştirmektedir.
ABSTRACT Advocates of Bitcoin and Modern Monetary Theory present their ideas as radical utopian alternatives to the neoliberal dominant, but these claims neglect the utopian strain in neoliberal monetary theory itself. This strain manifests in that theory’s faith in the capacity of markets to perfect human society. Bitcoin and Modern Monetary Theory express this same faith. After a brief survey of the older, more radical money utopias of More and Proudhon, this article traces the origins of Bitcoin and MMT in the more conventional monetary theories of metallism and chartalism and then analyzes the utopian discourse of both movements, revealing that Bitcoin sees state intervention as the only obstacle to properly functioning markets, while MMT blames disfunction on an inadequate mobilization of labor, proposing state intervention as the remedy. In both cases, their policies only seek to enable the utopian potential of the market, falling in line with neoliberal orthodoxy. The conclusion offers some speculation about what the emergence of these two theories might tell us about the future of neoliberalism.
This article examines banks’ de-risking practices inside Hong Kong's Anti-Money Laundering/Countering the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime, a problem that has created considerable tension between the demands of AML/CFT prevention and those of financial inclusion. It unravels the public policy tensions stemming from a multitude of financial reform causes, namely the facilitation of AML/CFT regulatory compliance, the promotion of financial technology (FinTech) innovation and an ultimate expansion in financial inclusion. The article argues that tiered account services are an important first step towards financial inclusion, culminating in the introduction of simple bank accounts by some banks to mitigate the effect of de-risking. While proposed solutions such as the know-your-client utility system and central data repository may contribute to a digital financial inclusion framework, they are not tailored to solve a specific problem (de-risking). The article therefore proposes and evaluates whether FinTech and blockchain-based smart contracts qualify as alternative solutions to de-risking. The article aims to address those policy tensions and contribute to the regulatory policy formulation and the rule-making for financial law and regulation intended to facilitate financial inclusion.
This article explores the emerging phenomenon of use cases for Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) in novel forms of crypto-finance, a stage we call ‘NFT financialisation’, that can be developed from stages of consumption and commoditisation of NFTs, which are increasingly observed. Despite the emerging contests regarding property rights conferred by NFTs, the needs for commoditisation and financialisation in NFT markets would likely shape the delineation and framing of such rights in order for users to exploit the asset potential of NFTs. We argue that an institutional response is timely and beneficial for NFT financialisation. Financial regulatory governance can provide the institutions of market certainty and order, also fostering the clarification and standardisation of property framing underlying NFTs. We explore aspects of financial regulatory governance for supporting the investment mobilisation of NFTs and suggest that these provide insights too for the broader regulatory agenda for crypto-finance, including novel forms of fund-raising and Decentralised Finance (DeFi). Such financial regulatory governance involves reform and we provide a critical discussion of the EU’s Markets in Crypto-assets Regulation in relation to NFT financialisation. We also suggest that NFT financialisation reinforces the need for financial regulatory agencies to confront the challenges that crypto-finance brings, in relation to unconventional products and services, by reconsidering the limitations of their scope and mandates.
Purpose Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are set to disrupt the real estate sector in all areas: ownership, sale, management and investment. Tokenization moves physical real estate to the digital space and could result in substantial cost savings in the pre- and post-tokenization process. This article discusses whether real estate as an asset class is ready for digitalization in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. Design/methodology/approach Globally, the APAC region has the highest digital adaptation/adoption rates. Regulators in the region are also moving fast to clarify their stance on digital assets. This article adopts a holistic view, from trends, regulations, and technology, to discuss the benefits and challenges of digitalizing real estate in APAC. Findings Real estate tokenization is a nascent market but platforms like BrickX, KASA, ADDX, and Minterest have successfully launched real estate tokens in Australia, South Korea, and Singapore, respectively. Tokenization may prove to be a viable funding source for those relatively poorly capitalized financial markets in the APAC region. Practical implications This paper discusses the current regulatory and business contexts in relation to the pace of tokenization of real estate in APAC. Opportunities and difficulties are outlined in a concise manner to facilitate more discussion in this area. Originality/value Existing reports and research articles tend to focus on the western markets. This article provides a new perspective on tokenization, specifically in the APAC context.
Despite the increase in literature on financial innovation as a force of change in the financial system, most contributions fail to analyze the relationship between the socio-institutional and technological design of cryptocurrencies. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a case study of Bitcoin, the most representative of the virtual and cryptocurrencies. We begin by addressing the concept of financial innovation as a social phenomenon embedded in networks of users, technologists, regulations, institutions, culture and history. Secondly, we examine the disruptive and evolutionary nature of the Bitcoin, comparing it with the characteristics of legal tender money. The main conclusions indicate that although Bitcoin represents a disruptive technology in the process of monetary creation through a peer-to-peer network, it is not a new conception of money in its institutional dimension.
Abstract This article consists of a critical review of the conceptual scholarship on the governance of climate finance and includes an overview of the institutional arrangements and governance logics that provide climate finance. New decentralized, polycentric structures allow for climate finance to more effectively reach the sub‐ and non‐state actors most directly implementing climate change governance. However, the expansion of climate finance into market‐inflected forms of blended finance, as well as debt‐based financing, express a neoliberal logic that shifts power to market actors. This may challenge the efficacy of climate finance. We suggest that further research is needed on polycentric systems in climate finance, since an apparent expansion in the diversity of providers is also accompanied by a counter‐intuitive concentration of decision‐making power with financial fund managers. We join others in suggesting that the weight of scholarship advocates for a strong return to public authored finance and governance, under the auspices of Green New Deal programs and more widely. This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance
In this paper I argue that the 2008 housing market crash was the culmination of a decades-long legislative process enabled by the federal government. I analyze the effects of these policies on Monroe County, Pennsylvania, which became and continues to be the site of one the worst foreclosure crises nationally. Federal policies that promoted decentralization, deindustrialization, and deregulation created the conditions in Monroe County that allowed real estate developers, banks, and brokers to take advantage of an urban crisis that was only 1.5 hours away in New York City—without traffic. I describe the process through the story of real estate developer Gene Percudani. Enabled by the federal government, Percudani lured black and Hispanic residents from New York City who were looking for affordable single family homes, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. Not only did these migrants not escape the urban crisis but continued to be victims of it—far away from home.
Recent technological progresses made it possible for complementary and community currencies to be increasingly transformed into digital currencies. An increasing number of them run on blockchain, a technology that allows for greater decentralization and trust-less systems. This fusion between social and cryptocurrencies opens a series of questionings: can social currencies maintain their values regarding the creation of community and a fuller citizenship? Is the total decentralization an important value for the communities that use social currencies? Can "trust", as defined for these monetary systems be replaced by a system that presupposes it? These comprehensive questions conform our current research project. With an inductive and multidisciplinary plan of demonstration in mind, this particular document tries to put in discussion the characteristics and potentialities, as well as the problems, limits and tensions generated by the circulation of digital currencies that run on Blockchain (cryptocurrencies), leaving for future research the in-depth discussion that this new mixture of technologies brings up. These issues will be addressed by studying the case of a digital social currency system running on blockchain, based on mutual credit, implemented in Argentina today: MonedaPAR, which was conceived as a defense mechanism against the economic crisis that plagues Argentina since 2016.
Joseph Vogl's new book, Capital and Ressentiment (2021/2022), traces an epistemic shift from knowledge to information driven by the convergence of financialization and the platform economy. As a variable that is determined less by semantic content than by difference to existing expectations, information invites indifference to other distinctions, such as those between fact and fiction, claim and proof. The circulation of information takes the form of opinion markets wherein the production of reality itself is at stake. In this extract, taken from the book's final chapter, “The cunning of ressentiment-driven reason”, Vogl analyses populist ressentiment as both structural affect of and vital resource for information capitalism, laying out the resulting reconfiguration of the social.
Abstract Postcapitalist commons are a growing area of interest in the efforts to generate alternatives to capitalism in the present. Commons are understood as self‐organised collectives based around shared resources; yet postcapitalist commons have an additional element, in operating within while projecting an “after” capitalism. This can give rise to tensions since commons striving for postcapitalism also require a certain amount of capital to survive and function within capitalism. FairCoop is a radical postcapitalist commons that adopted the cryptocurrency FairCoin in 2014. FairCoop, through FairCoin, was able to generate some trans‐local connections through its use of peer2peer technologies and was thus able to scale‐up. Its design, however, was ultimately unsustainable due to insufficiently clear boundaries from capital. After highlighting the lack of commons boundaries around FairCoop, we identify some additional commons‐capital boundary design principles which could contribute to the sustainability of future postcapitalist commons experiments that are seeking to scale.
Neoliberalism initially invoked the authority of competitive markets as the ideal epistemic mechanism for socio-economic coordination. Yet, the rise of neoliberal ‘market society’ in Western advanced economies since the 1970s has been underpinned by a normative political theory that advocates the reconfiguration of society and politics around the authority of economic theory and knowledge in both production, but especially finance. Conversely, the reform-era development of China’s ‘socialist market economy’ has been underpinned by an insistence on retaining centralized political power over the allocation of financial capital. This article argues that the rise of digital algorithmic technologies constitutes one means by which these contrasting politico-economic visions are being more closely reconciled. It investigates the ways in which China’s ongoing construction of an explicitly authoritarian capitalism is being facilitated by the deployment of complementary financial technologies that enable the Chinese Communist Party to embrace the micro-level epistemic coordinative function of markets without relinquishing macro-level political power and juridical sovereignty over these markets. Following a comparative historiography of the praxis of ‘neoliberal’ and ‘neostatist’ political theory in contemporary capitalism, two case studies of blockchain-enabled currency and big-data driven credit scoring in China illustrate the emergent Fintech foundations of Chinese authoritarian capitalism. The findings contribute to our understanding of how markets are being reshaped by new algorithmic technologies, as well as illuminate some of ideological contradictions in existing conceptions of markets as (neo)liberal institutions at the centre of capitalist political economy.
Over the last decade, the term ‘gig economy’ has risen to prominence in public discourse, but has failed to attract sustained attention from political philosophers. The gig economy is a subsection of the overall economy that predominantly relies on ‘on-demand work’:11 Prassl 2018, p. 11. workers22 Throughout this article, we deliberately speak of ‘workers’ in a broad sense: not only those permanently employed count as workers of a firm, but all those who actually work for it. receive short-term and freelance contracts rather than permanent jobs. Firms treat them as independent sellers of services and only hire them to perform a particular ‘gig’, that is, to complete a specified task or project. Gig work thereby increases the granularity of work contracts: work is sold in ever smaller quantities and, in extremis, firms only buy the exact amount of labour they need, at the particular moment they need it. On a social level, the higher granularity of labour market transactions leads to an expansion of the reach of markets. Not only a one-off hiring decision, but the conditions of every single micro-labour contract become subject to the market forces of supply and demand. From an economic perspective, the ability to hire and dispense with workers at will is often seen as a measure for ‘removing friction’ in labour markets, and unlocking efficiency gains as ‘unproductive human capital’ is ‘set free’.33 On the flexibilization of labour markets in the 1990s, see Davies and Freedland 2007. Major expositions of this policy programme include European Commission 1994; OECD 1994. Whenever a firm can do without a worker’s additional unit of labour, she re-enters the labour market, which can then, in theory, allocate her work to the most productive use. The business practices of ride-service providers like Uber and Lyft in the US best embody this trend, paying drivers by the ride and only if there are rides. But, beyond such extreme and well-publicized cases, many firms are gradually moving away from the paradigmatic form of employment in the industrial age—a job with a fixed number of hours, worked in set shifts, in one place, and for a predetermined salary (call this ‘standard employment’)—towards work that is contracted at short notice on the basis of current demand (call this ‘gig work’).44 Some other forms of work, like fixed-term employment with a longer duration or employment at temporary work agencies, lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. They often display many of the normatively problematic features of gig work, but to a lesser extent. While various statistics employ different criteria for determining whether or not someone counts as a contract worker, the number of people affected by this shift has dramatically increased over the past decades and is projected to rise further. According to a recent study, those in alternative work arrangements—like on-call workers, contract workers, and freelancers—made up 15.8 per cent of the US workforce in 2015, up from 10.7 per cent a decade before.55 Katz and Krueger 2019, p. 382. At Google, contract workers are now reported to outnumber permanent staff.66 Wakabayashi 2019. The trend towards gig work poses a challenge to the paradigm of standard employment, which is modelled on the industrial worker and has dominated debates in political philosophy and labour economics.77 See also Vallas and Schor (2020), who focus on the specific context of the platform economy, where firms obtain a near-monopoly position in connecting buyers and sellers of labour. 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Abstract How might the structure of banking affect economic resilience? We address this question by analyzing how the organizational structures of banks and banking markets were associated with unemployment trajectories in local economies during the Great Recession. Two county-level analyses yield convergent results. Increasing branch densities of giant derivative holding banks within local economies were associated with greater surges in unemployment, weaker employment recoveries and stronger recession effects on unemployment from 2007 through 2016. Increasing branch densities of community banks and credit unions and localism in banking were associated with lower unemployment spikes, stronger recoveries and dampened crisis effects. These findings advance sociological studies of finance by providing new quantitative evidence for links between the social structures of banking and economic performance. They also confound arguments that decentralized systems of small, locally based financial institutions are inherently fragile by design, suggesting instead that alternatives to ‘too-big-to-fail’ banking can enhance local economies’ capacities to adapt proactively, withstand crisis and sustain employment during recessions.
In the last few decades, most Latin American countries have made good progress in improving the living conditions of urban populations, but still face enormous challenges. This paper describes the roles of city and other local governments in designing housing policies and integrating them into governance, planning and finance. This includes many innovations in local governments’ housing policies, especially those implemented in the first decade of this century by progressive city governments. It also includes decentralization that supported municipal governments to develop their housing and urban development plans. Relevant as well are policies to address the quantitative deficit (insufficient supply of housing) and the qualitative deficit (inadequate quality of housing), such as informal settlement upgrading. The paper includes examples of where housing policy decentralization created spaces for democratic, participatory and inclusive city governance. It also highlights the importance for social housing of finance and the measures that may be taken to address this, including land management instruments and capture of real estate surplus value. But much of this innovation has been lost over the last decade, after the economic crisis and the rise of a new wave of conservative regimes in the region.
‘First, it was just tech people. Now, literally everyone is interested in bitcoin’, said CNN News while reporting on the bitcoin mania that haunted South Korean society in the winter of 2017–2018. This study takes that speculative frenzy as an entry point for exploring lay bitcoin investors’ experiences and the ‘magical’ features of contemporary financial capitalism. It first situates the bitcoin investment boom in the contexts of South Korea’s post-developmental transition and the rise of mass investment culture. Drawing upon participant observation of online communities for South Korea’s bitcoin investors, this study then demonstrates how lay bitcoin investors’ daily beliefs and practices are distinguished from more traditional economic subjectivities – namely, disciplined workers and rational investors. Lay bitcoin investors present themselves not simply as calculative investors but also as enchanted gamblers who often rely upon magical formulas and rituals that express their hopes and despairs in the face of an uncertain future. Instead of dismissing their beliefs and rituals as ‘irrational exuberance’, this study argues that their cultural practices should be understood as a reflexive response to the ‘magical’ mechanisms of the financial market based on self-referential valuation and self-fulfilling performativity. In examining how the logics of uncertainty and magic are returned at the heart of contemporary capitalism, this study consequently seeks to situate the lay investors’ struggles in dealing with the ambiguous future within the broader transformation of the human condition during the triumphant rise of financial capitalism.
This chapter examines the forces that produced Indonesia’s highly mobilized but politically independent labor movement. It describes the authoritarian legacies that shaped the first phase of its evolution when the labor movement had no choice but to use street politics as its primary weapon in the struggle for more worker-friendly labor policy. In a second phase, new opportunities opened by the decentralization process led unions to experiment with electoral engagement. The focus of these efforts was at the local level where union activists backed executive candidates from many different parties, pragmatically trading their political support for pro-labor measures. In a third phase, unions drew on their past organizational learning and experimentation to extend their electoral engagement to the legislative arena. Reluctant to tie themselves directly to a single party, union strategists chose to place union cadres on legislative tickets of many different political parties. Autonomous electoral participation now complemented street politics as central features of labor’s political strategy.