The Financial Consequences of Export-led Growth in Germany and Italy

Jones, Erik

doi:10.1080/09644008.2021.1881955

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Germany’s public investment gap is striking—spending net of depreciation has been consistently negative since 1988 (Klein and Pettis 2020 , p. 168). While unmet domestic investment needs were plenty, German savings flew into (risky) foreign assets, often beyond productive investment opportunities (Jones 2021 ). German investors saw a whopping 7% valuation loss on their foreign assets since 1999 (Klein and Pettis 2020 , p. 86).…”

Section: Distributional Conflicts Generated By German Ca Surplusesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The silent losers of Germany’s export surpluses. How current account imbalances are exacerbated by the misrepresentation of their domestic costs

Polyak

2022

Comp Eur Polit

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Germany’s excessive current account surpluses mirror domestic problems. They are rooted in inequality and a weak home market, creating an overdependence on exports. Why, then, are policymakers so reluctant to reduce them? This paper argues that a contributing factor is the public misrepresentation of surpluses’ domestic costs. Imbalances are narrated as distributional conflicts between countries, not within them; and bilateral trade is framed as a competition, where surplus countries win. The analysis reconstructs stakeholders’ positions and discursive strategies through media narratives and Bundestag debates, using an original dataset of public statements. It finds evidence for a systematic bias disregarding the domestic losers of surpluses. Whenever imbalances are discussed, the triggering event is outside criticism, mainly from the European Commission and the US. The ensuing debate follows an ‘us versus them’ logic, where foreign critics clash with domestic defenders—mainly the government and export-sector organisations. The success narrative and identitarian discourse about an ‘export nation’ limits left-wing actors’ room to move beyond incremental criticism. The analysis finds an effect of European integration exacerbating imbalances. Germans fend off critics by an arena-shifting strategy: pointing out that exchange rates and trade are European-level prerogatives, disregarding internal policy levers for rebalancing.

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Section: Distributional Conflicts Generated By German Ca Surplusesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The silent losers of Germany’s export surpluses. How current account imbalances are exacerbated by the misrepresentation of their domestic costs

Polyak

2022

Comp Eur Polit

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“…Despite receiving important updates on banking (Hardie et al, 2013) and institutional investors (Deeg and Hardie, 2016), the core CPE framework continued to operate on a highly abstracted model of the financial system. More recently, the financial and debt crisis of the Euro area has sparked new interest in cross-border financial flows (Schelkle, 2017;Jones, 2021) and in mortgage finance (Kohl, 2018;Fuller et al, 2019;Schwartz, 2020), and the growth model literature has incorporated mortgage and consumption finance into its core framework (Baccaro and Pontusson, 2016). CPE scholars have also increasingly asked how the growth models and regulatory regimes of open economies are shaped by their position within, and interaction with, the European or global financial system, thus bridging the gap with international political economy (Nölke and Vliegenthart, 2009;Regan and Brazys, 2018;Ban and Bohle, 2021;Piroska et al, 2021).…”

Section: Finance In Comparative and International Political Economy A...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The three phases of financial power: Leverage, infrastructure, and enforcement

Braun¹,

Koddenbrock²

2022

Preprint

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How does global capitalism – a highly unstable system that creates vast inequalities – continue to reproduce itself? Despite the burgeoning literature on financialization, large gaps remain in our understanding of the profitability and concentration of the financial sector, and of its ability to reassert itself after financial crises. This chapter develops a framework for the analysis of the political economy of global finance that centers on the claim relation between creditors and debtors. It foregrounds creation, trading, and enforcement as key stages in the life-cycle of financial claims. At each stage, the conflict between creditors and debtors takes different forms as both sides seek to manipulate the claim relationship to their advantage. However, the two sides in this tussle are not equal. We introduce the concepts of leverage power, infrastructural power and enforcement power as analytical tools to study the inequalities and hierarchies embedded in, and reproduced via, credit-debt relationships in contemporary global financial capitalism.

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“…19 Recent contributions have also discussed the changing political and economic role of banks through the lens of their diminishing capacity to provide loans to the economy. 20 But this traditional vision gives us an overly restrictive notion of structural power. Traditionally, banks drew power from providing credit to the real economy.…”

Section: Large Eurozone Banks' Expansion and The Traditional Foundati...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Banks’ Structural Power and States’ Choices on What Structurally Matters: The Geo-Economic Foundations of State Priority toward Banking in France, Germany, and Spain

Massoc

2022

Politics & Society

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Since the 2008 financial crisis, Europe's largest banks have largely remained unchallenged. Is this because of the structural power banks continue to hold over states? This article challenges the view that states are sheer hostages of banks’ capacity to provide credit to the real economy—the conventional definition of structural power. Instead, it sheds light on the geo-economic dimension of banks’ power: key public officials conceive the position of “their own” banks in global financial markets as a crucial dimension of state power. State priority toward banking thus results from political choices as to what structurally matters most for the state. Based on a discourse analysis of parliamentary debates in France, Germany, and Spain, as well as on a comparative analysis of the implementation of a special tax on banks, this article shows that power dynamics within states largely shape political priorities toward banking at both domestic and international levels.

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The Financial Consequences of Export-led Growth in Germany and Italy

Cited by 7 publications

References 39 publications

The silent losers of Germany’s export surpluses. How current account imbalances are exacerbated by the misrepresentation of their domestic costs

The silent losers of Germany’s export surpluses. How current account imbalances are exacerbated by the misrepresentation of their domestic costs

The three phases of financial power: Leverage, infrastructure, and enforcement

Banks’ Structural Power and States’ Choices on What Structurally Matters: The Geo-Economic Foundations of State Priority toward Banking in France, Germany, and Spain

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