Financial geography I: The state-finance nexus

Abstract

In the first of my reports on financial geography, I focus on a growing body of work that engages with the state as a vital and strategic actor in financial markets and in the global economy. After the 2008 global financial crisis, austerity measures and impacts on public finance have reshaped local-central government relationships with increasing use of financial instruments and market solutions. The growing prominence of sovereign wealth funds, shifting roles of national development banks and central banks, and impacts of currency internationalisation are raising questions about new forms of financial statecraft and opportunities for changing configurations of global hegemony. Taken together, a renewed engagement with a political economic lens and focus on state-finance relations illuminate the changing positionalities of economies and financial actors in the spatial organisation of international financial and monetary relations.

Making space for the new state capitalism, part III: Thinking conjuncturally

“…More broadly, Sokol argues, “the capital-generating role [performed by central banks] appears to be essential for the survival of contemporary capitalism” (Sokol, 2023: xx). The contemporary mutations of central banking, made especially visible in the wake of the global financial crisis and pandemic, thus appear as a prime instance (and powerful vector) of conjunctural rearticulation of state-finance entanglements (see also Hillier, 2022; Lai, 2023).…”

“…The concept of the new state capitalism, along with its various geopolitical constructions, can themselves be located among the downstream consequences of an earlier crisis, the global financial crisis beginning in 2008, and in the long decade that has followed they have been implicated and indexed in various ways in the renewal of dirigiste forms of industrial interventionism, in returns to protectionism and nationalism, in the rise of new modalities of economic statecraft and “derisking state” strategies, among other developments (cf. Gabor, 2021; Lai, 2023; Lavery, 2023; O'Sullivan and Rethel, 2023; Piroska and Schlett, 2023; Schindler et al, 2023; Skalamera Groce and Köstem, 2023). These, in the context of a plethora of other “polycritical” conditions represent fertile—not to say urgent—opportunities for just the kind of grounded, granular, and reflexive approaches that have been hallmarks of critical economic geography, of geographical political economy, and spatialized adaptations of conjunctural analysis.…”