From Commodity to Asset and Back Again: Property in the Capitalism of Varieties

Braun, Veit

doi:10.7551/mitpress/12075.003.0012

Cited by 8 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…storing oil in railcars or oil tankers until its price increases). This transformation of a commodity like oil into an asset, as it is stored in railway cars or oil tankers, illustrates the need to understand the liminal spaces between commodity and asset, rent, and profit (also Braun, 2020;Delvenne, 2020). Here, then, assetization brings into view the commonalities underlying these disparate processes of property formation and regulation under conditions of financial globalization, and the attempts of investors to navigate this as both a political and an economic risk across diverse geographical dimensions (Raco et al, 2019;Brill and Robin, 2020).…”

Section: Globalization and Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’

Birch

Ward

2022

Dialogues in Human Geography

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An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset's income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. Geographers and other social scientists are producing a growing literature illustrating the range of new (and old) asset classes created by capitalists in their search for revenue streams, for which we argue assetization is a necessary concept to focus on the moment of enclosure and rent extraction. It is a pressing task for human geographers to unpack the diverse and contingent ‘asset geographies’ entailed in this assetization process. As a middle range concept and empirical problematic, we argue that assetization is an important focal point for wider debates in human geography by focusing attention on the moment of enclosure, rent extraction, and material remaking of society which the making of a financial asset implies.

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Section: Globalization and Governancementioning

confidence: 99%