New Finance for America's Cities

Placing the Production of Investment Returns: An Economic Geography of Asset Management in Public Pension Plans

“…An instance of the trend has been observed as the hype around hedge-funds faded in favour of global investments in assets such as private equity, real estate and infrastructure. Hebb and Sharma (2013) workers embodied financial skills and expertise will become increasingly redundant.…”

“…Some authors have partially attended to this gap by providing evidences of grassroots manifestations of a paradigm shift in the logic governing these interactions. Hebb and Sharma's (2013) According to Hooke and Walters (2013), in 2012 state and local pension plans collectively paid over 9bn USD in investment fees to private contractors. As the level of private sector revenues is a function of institutional investors' strategic decision to "make-or-buy" (Baker and Hubbard, 2003) their investment processes, one can only expect the industry to be wary of change and incentivised to adapt the products and services they offer to institutional investors.…”

Actors of financialization in the German housing system

“…I report here the most notably diffused in the study of this process on housing: • financialization is "a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production" (Krippner 2005, 174); • financialization represents "the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and international economies" (Epstein 2004, 3); • "financialization corresponds to financial neoliberalism which is characterized by domination of the macro economy and economic policy by financial sector interests" (Palley 2013, 1); • financialization is the process by which something is managed as a fund and is defined as "the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households" (Aalbers 2019, 3). The transformation of the urban landscape and also the residential real estate, it has been therefore argued, is now assessed on financial criteria (Harvey 2006;Brenner 2009;Torrance 2009), as investments made by financial actors are basically driven by the extraction of profit, while the social effects are merely a spin off effect of their investment strategies (Hebb and Sharma 2014). This raises therefore fundamental political, economic and societal issues.…”

Demographic Decline, Population Aging, and Modern Financial Approaches to Urban Policy

“…This may prove to be particularly relevant in tackling the problems of demographic changes and aging populations, as microinitiatives to fund cost-effective measures to support increasingly frail populations are likely to be an essential ingredient of high-impact investment portfolios for these cities. In parallel to new bottom-up funding opportunities and initiatives, according to Hebb and Sharma (2014), urban finance is moving rapidly toward the financialization of cities, with pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds becoming major private investors in this arena. Some scholars (Bongman 2011; O’Brien and Keith 2009; Clark and Wojcik 2007) argue that this increased financialization is likely to turn the attention of urban asset managers to financial performance so as to extract maximum financial value, and such action would take place largely at the expense of social benefits.…”