Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance
Benjamin Braun and Kai Koddenbrock (eds.)
MPIfG Book
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.
This book will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers of international political economy, critical political economy, and international relations, as well as those in the fields of finance, capitalism studies, activism, policymaking, and advocacy.
Contents
1 The three phases of financial power: leverage, infrastructure, and enforcement
Benjamin Braun and Kai Koddenbrock
PART I Leverage power
2 Leveraging financial claims: transatlantic bank struggles and the power of US finance
Mareike Beck, Samuel Knafo, and Stefano Sgambati
3 Countering financial claims: on the political economy of definancialisation
Sahil Jai Dutta
4 Relational claims: offshore dollar and sovereign debt
Andrea Binder
5 Claims to sovereignty: MMT as a challenge to money’s technical imaginary
Aaron Sahr
PART II Infrastructural power
6 The new gatekeepers of financial claims: states, passive markets, and the growing power of index providers
Jan Fichtner, Eelke Heemskerk and Johannes Petry
7 The benefits of network centrality: central counterparties, the enforceability of claims, and the securing of extra-profits
Matthias Thiemann
8 Geoeconomic infrastructures: building Chinese-Russian alternatives to SWIFT
Andreas Nölke
PART III Enforcement power
9 Night of the living debt: non-performing loans and the politics of making an asset class in Europe
Daniel Mertens and Caroline Metz
10 The financialization of investor-state dispute settlement
Florence Dafe and Zoe Phillips Williams
11 Firm claims: reinterpreting the global race for foreign direct investment
Arjan Reurink and Javier Garcia-Bernardo
12 Claiming the wealth of a nation: creditor-enforced privatizations in Greece
Benjamin Lemoine and Marie Piganiol
PART IV Conclusion
13 The rise of autonomous financial power
Katharina Pistor
Editors
Benjamin Braun
Kai Koddenbrock
Reviews
“Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance cuts through the flows of global finance, revealing how financial instruments operate through law, state power, and hierarchy. A return to the best kind of political economy.”
Amin Samman, Senior Lecturer in International Political Economy at City, University of London, UK
“In this excellent collection, some of the sharpest minds in contemporary political economy help us understand the ways different modes of power saturate contemporary financial capitalism. The light they shine illuminates not just the rules and hierarchies that coordinate that power, but also the processes through which those who enjoy it make, and enforce, claims upon the world that reach far beyond the realm of ‘finance.’ In a moment in which private finance is hailed as the solution to everything from housing to climate change, this book does crucial work.”
Geoff Mann, Professor in the Department of Geography at Simon Fraser University, Canada
“Finance capital claims a central role in our political economy. This book unpacks its power/s to do so, through an impressive collection of brilliant contributions.”
Daniela Gabor, Professor of Economics and Macro-Finance at the University of the West of England, UK
“Capital Claims: Power and Global Finance succeeds in reconciling the different academic debates around financialization, financial power, and state capacity by creating a common glossary of terms and concepts and showing promising and important directions for further research. In doing so, it is an essential read for social scientists from all specializations and for anyone who is interested in understanding the underlying power dynamics at the heart of contemporary capitalism.”
Jonas von Ciriacy-Wantrup, Department of Sociology, Freie Universität Berlin (In: economic sociology. perspectives and conversations 24 (2), 2023)
