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

Abstract

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.

States and Experts: Assembling Expertise for Climate Change and Pandemics

“…In order to develop an approach that does not regard state power as a function of state aid but rather the result of the state's capacity to deploy public finances, this paper combines scholarship on the infrastructural power of the state Soifer & vom Hau 2008;Braun & Koddenbrock 2022) with work on how domestic elite networks limit states' room for maneuver (Mills 1956;Larsen & Ellersgaard 2018). Research in this domain, focused on elites in national political-economic orders, emphasizes how elites shape the ideas and solutions available to policymakers by forming or colonizing meso-level institutions and networks Henriksen & Seabrooke 2021).…”