Interviews

Rules of Restraint

The majority of countries in the world have some sort of fiscal rule: an institutional constraint on fiscal policies to discourage government overspending and reduce political influence on state expenditure. But these rules have their own politics. As Clara Zanon Brenck and Pedro Romero Marques write in their recent Phenomenal World essay:

Swap Structure

Have interest rate swaps become the modern repos? In the latest essay in the ongoing series on Market Microstructures, I argue that shifts in the liquidity market have fundamentally altered the function of interest rate swaps (IRS) in the global financial system. Today, IRS are used to fill funding gaps and compensate for failures in the repurchase agreement (repo) market. 

Marketing War

Sudan’s ongoing war between two military formations—the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces—has killed thousands and displaced millions. The current crisis follows years of political upheaval across the country. In late 2018, mass protests calling for democratic rule led to the collapse of the President al-Bashir’s thirty-year regime. By July 2019, different factions of a military-civilian interim government had agreed on a transition to democracy, but in October 2021, the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces—with the aid of the Rapid Support Forces—took control of the government in a military coup. Since April, a conflict between two military generals and former allies has descended into a civil war, engulfing the capital city of Khartoum and many other regions of the nation.

Fragile Democracies

Pranab Bardhan is Professor Emeritus of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Among the foremost global scholars of development, distribution, and trade, his twelve books and more than one hundred fifty journal articles cross disciplinary boundaries in an effort to critically grapple with the conditions needed for a more equitable society. In Land, Labor, and Rural Poverty, he considers the relationship between land tenure, agricultural employment, and rural poverty. The groundbreaking Political Economy of Development in India integrated Marxian class analysis with a rational-choice methodology and a Weberian institutional lens to reflect on the structural impediments that have slowed India’s industrial growth. His new book, A World of Insecurity, re-examines the conditions underlying democratic disenchantment. 

Working Capital

The Federal Reserve has provided payment and settlement services for more than a century. But FedNow, the instant payments service rolled out in late June 2023, is the first new Fed payments rail in 50 years. Though payment and settlement are crucial pillars of economic transations and global money flows, systemic disinterest persists regarding these financial pipelines.

Making Markets

The Gamestop bubble of 2021—where the value of the company’s stocks increased more than a hundred times over in just a few months—exemplified the rising trend of the meme stock frenzy. The event shed light on the role of retail day traders and market-makers in contemporary equity markets, and it also contributed to the justification for the US Securities and Exchange Committee’s (SEC) recent proposals to regulate market-making businesses.

Sectional Industrialization

Few scholars have done more to elucidate the relationship between democracy and economic development in the United States and its corresponding regional—or “sectional”—antagonisms than Richard Franklin Bensel, the Gary S. Davis professor of government at Cornell University. Among Bensel’s published works are Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980 (1984), Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (1990), and The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (2000), all of which introduce key arguments about the course of U.S. political economy that remain critical to understanding the evolution of the two-party system and its cross-class coalitions.

Bittersweet Tides

The recent victories of left parties across Latin America—most recently the election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil—have prompted comparisons with the Pink Tide of the early 2000s. But with narrow margins of victory against far-right opponents, fragile coalitions, and the effects of global economic disruption fueling discontent, the current moment looks very different than the last.

Cyborg Trucking

The supply and demand whiplashes of the Covid-19 pandemic snarled global supply chains, shaking up labor markets and well-established migration patterns. In the process, existing cracks in logistics and infrastructure systems widened, making these systems newly visible. In the US and Europe, a dramatic shortage in the supply of long-haul truck drivers sparked panic amongst businesses and policymakers during 2021.

Ventures & Networks

The past year of rampant inflation and energy system chaos is a clear indication that we need paradigmatic change. Any new economic system is going to be anchored by major scientific innovations; historically, spurring these technological transformations has required a mix of initial state action followed by entrepreneurial execution. Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law is a cutting, prescient analysis which argues that the individual who currently stands as a symbol of market excess—the venture capitalist—will be required for such a transformation.

Who Pays for Inflation?

The inflation of the past year has reshaped the political economic landscape in the United States and around the globe. While the IMF and World Bank echo UN calls about the recession risk of globally-synchronized rate hikes, the debate over the causes—and definition—of inflation continues to be unsettled. As does the question of the politics of inflation and its distributional impacts—who benefits and who pays.

Bottom-up Bargaining

China’s high-speed railway network is one of the largest infrastructure programs in human history. Though today international headlines emphasize the decline in China’s growth—lagging behind the rest of Asia for the first time since 1990—for more than two decades, the central government has been investing vast sums into the country’s public infrastructure. The political processes underlying this government investment—and the causes for drastic regional variation in investment—have remained overwhelmingly underexplored. In his newly published book Localized Bargaining (Oxford University Press, 2022), Xiao Ma offers a novel theory of intergovernmental bargaining that examines the unfolding of China’s unprecedented high-speed railway program. Drawing on a wealth of in-depth interviews, original data sets, and surveys with local officials, Ma details how the bottom-up bargaining efforts by territorial authorities―whom the central bureaucracies rely on to implement various infrastructure projects―shaped the allocation of investment in the railway system. Demonstrating how localities of different types invoke institutional and extra-institutional sources of bargaining power in their competition for railway stations, Ma’s new book sheds light on how the nation’s massive bureaucracy actually functions.

Resource Nationalism and Decarbonization

Across Latin America, a recent wave of left electoral victories has drawn comparisons to “Pink Tide” of the early 2000s. The current moment, however, coincides with a global push towards decarbonization, and much of the world’s supply of commodities essential to that transition—most prominently lithium—are found in the region. How will these new left governments navigate this frontier of resource extraction? 

The Economic Style

For some, neoliberalism is to blame for most, if not all, of our societal problems, as well as for the resistance to progressive changes that characterizes contemporary policymaking. This is for good reason. As has been extensively documented, the neoliberal obsession with fiscal austerity and efficiency has been associated with the increase of inequality, precariousness of job contracts, and dismantling of safety nets throughout the world. 

The IMF & the Legacy of Bretton Woods

Fifty years on from the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the role of the international monetary system and international financial institutions in managing the global economy are in question.

Fault Lines

Restarting our economies after the pandemic continues to expose the fragility of our supply chains. The Russia-Ukraine conflict serves as a stark reminder that oil and gas can still dictate our anxieties. Commodity prices and our collective sense of vulnerability are both at multi-decade highs. By placing the geopolitics of energy at its core, Disorder by Helen Thompson provides us with an essential schematic understanding of our current crises.

Philosophy and Reparations

Every new climate study seems to confirm what we have long known: the brunt of these impacts will fall on those least prepared to weather them, in considerable part because the basic structure of our global system had long ago elected these people and places as expendable in service of the projects of world economy. Meanwhile, scholars of past and present injustices—those studying issues such as uneven development or vaccine apartheid, seemingly unconnected to climate catastrophe—still uncover the same regularities. There are those who “developed” and those who were sacrificed at the altar of development. The widespread knowledge of these facts, at least among the Global North elite broadly conceived, make the moral and political character of our circumstances unique. It seems that the more we know, the more we owe. 

Tax Regimes

Tax cuts and austerity have been a central feature of American politics in recent decades—just recently, the Build Back Better bill was blocked under the guise of fiscal responsibility. The work of Robin Einhorn, Preston Hotchkis Professor in the History of the United States at UC Berkeley, makes sense of these dynamics. Through a broad historical perspective, Einhorn has shed light on Americans' complicated relationship to taxes: from the colonial period, through the American Civil War, to the tax revolts of the 1980s.

Structures of History

Few scholars have had the theoretical, methodological, and empirical influence of William Sewell. His work has persistently scrutinized and challenged disciplinary barriers, placing historical and social scientific methods in dialogue and thereby illuminating their strengths and shortcomings. This effort is most pronounced in his 2005 book, Logics of History, which assembles deep and profound reflections on scholarly understandings of time, contingency, and path dependence. It's in this text that Sewell presents his much cited conception of structure as a multiplicity of "schemas and resources" which combine and intersect in unpredictable ways, and makes the case for an "eventful" temporality which appreciates radical and sudden historical transformations.