Debt as Power

Debt as Power PDF Author: Richard H. Robbins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526104830
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Debt as power is a timely and innovative contribution to our understanding of one of the most prescient issues of our time: the explosion of debt across the global economy and related requirement of political leaders to pursue exponential growth to meet the demands of creditors and investors. The book is distinctive in offering a historically sensitive and comprehensive analysis of debt as an interconnected and global phenomenon.

Debt as Power

Debt as Power PDF Author: Richard H. Robbins
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526104830
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Get Book Here

Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Debt as power is a timely and innovative contribution to our understanding of one of the most prescient issues of our time: the explosion of debt across the global economy and related requirement of political leaders to pursue exponential growth to meet the demands of creditors and investors. The book is distinctive in offering a historically sensitive and comprehensive analysis of debt as an interconnected and global phenomenon.

Public Debt, Inequality, and Power

Public Debt, Inequality, and Power PDF Author: Sandy Brian Hager
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520284666
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
Introduction : public debt, inequality and power -- The spectacle of a highly centralized public debt -- The bondholding class resurgent -- Fiscal conflict : past and present -- Bonding domestic and foreign owners -- Who rules the debt state? -- Conclusion : informing democratic debate -- Appendix : accounting for the public debt

Money

Money PDF Author: Michel Aglietta
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1786634449
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The major French economist offers a new theory of money As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, with little to stop it. When a senator asked Bernanke what would happen if the central bank did not carry out its rescue package, he replied, “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.” What saved finance, and the Western economy, was fiscal and monetary stimulus – an influx of money, created ad hoc. It was a strategy that raised questions about the unexamined nature of money itself, an object suddenly revealed as something other than a neutral signifier of value. Through its grip on finance and the debt system, money confers sovereign power on the economy. If confidence in money is not maintained, crises follow. Looking over the last 5,000 years, Michel Aglietta explores the development of money and its close connection to sovereign power. This book employs the tools of anthropology, history and political economy in order to analyse how political structures and monetary systems have transformed one another. We can thus grasp the different eras of monetary regulation and the crises capitalism has endured throughout its history.

Can't Pay, Won't Pay

Can't Pay, Won't Pay PDF Author: Collective Debt
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642593826
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Debtors have been mocked, scolded and lied to for decades. We have been told that it is perfectly normal to go into debt to get medical care, to go to school, or even to pay for our own incarceration. We’ve been told there is no way to change an economy that pushes the majority of people into debt while a small minority hoard wealth and power. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed that mass indebtedness and extreme inequality are a political choice. In the early days of the crisis, elected officials drew up plans to spend trillions of dollars. The only question was: where would the money go and who would benefit from the bailout? The truth is that there has never been a lack of money for things like housing, education and health care. Millions of people never needed to be forced into debt for those things in the first place. Armed with this knowledge, a militant debtors movement has the potential to rewrite the contract and assure that no one has to mortgage their future to survive. Debtors of the World Must Unite. As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful.

States, Debt, and Power

States, Debt, and Power PDF Author: Kenneth H. F. Dyson
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0198714076
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 801

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Book Description
States, Debt, and Power deals with one of the most pressing political and policy issues of the 21st century: the so-called 'crisis of debt' with its effects on perceptions of state power and of the relevance and value of democratic politics and of European integration.

War on Debt

War on Debt PDF Author: John F. Avanzini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781878605009
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In this book John Avanzini shows from Scripture that God does not want you burdened with the responsibility of debt and points the way to breaking out of the debt cycle.

Toxic Debt

Toxic Debt PDF Author: Josiah Rector
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469665778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risks for poor and working-class Detroiters, made all the worse for African Americans by housing and job discrimination. Then as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries turned those risks into disasters with predatory loans to African American homebuyers, and to an increasingly indebted city government. Following years of cuts in welfare assistance to poor families and a devastating subprime mortgage meltdown, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities. In Detroit and Flint, austerity policies imposed under emergency financial management deprived hundreds of thousands of people of clean water, with lethal consequences that most recently exacerbated the spread of COVID-19. Toxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.

Too Little, Too Late

Too Little, Too Late PDF Author: Martin Guzman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154202X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
The current approach to resolving sovereign debt crises does not work: sovereign debt restructurings come too late and address too little. Though unresolved debt crises impose enormous costs on societies, many recent restructurings have not been deep enough to provide the conditions for economic recovery (as illustrated by the Greek debt restructuring of 2012). And if the debtor decides not to accept the terms demanded by the creditors, finalizing a restructuring can be slowed by legal challenges (as illustrated by the recent case of Argentina, deemed as "the trial of the century"). A fresh start for distressed debtors is a basic principle of a well-functioning market economy, yet there is no international bankruptcy framework for sovereign debts. While this problem is not new, the United Nations and the global community are now willing to do something about it. Providing guidance for those who intend to take up reform, this book assesses the relative merits of various debt-restructuring proposals, especially in relation to the main deficiencies of the current nonsystem. With contributions by leading academics and practitioners, Too Little, Too Late reflects the overwhelming consensus among specialists on the need to find workable solutions.

Leveraged

Leveraged PDF Author: Moritz Schularick
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681694X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
An authoritative guide to the new economics of our crisis-filled century. Published in collaboration with the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The 2008 financial crisis was a seismic event that laid bare how financial institutions’ instabilities can have devastating effects on societies and economies. COVID-19 brought similar financial devastation at the beginning of 2020 and once more massive interventions by central banks were needed to heed off the collapse of the financial system. All of which begs the question: why is our financial system so fragile and vulnerable that it needs government support so often? For a generation of economists who have risen to prominence since 2008, these events have defined not only how they view financial instability, but financial markets more broadly. Leveraged brings together these voices to take stock of what we have learned about the costs and causes of financial fragility and to offer a new canonical framework for understanding it. Their message: the origins of financial instability in modern economies run deeper than the technical debates around banking regulation, countercyclical capital buffers, or living wills for financial institutions. Leveraged offers a fundamentally new picture of how financial institutions and societies coexist, for better or worse. The essays here mark a new starting point for research in financial economics. As we muddle through the effects of a second financial crisis in this young century, Leveraged provides a road map and a research agenda for the future.

Why Not Default?

Why Not Default? PDF Author: Jerome E. Roos
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691184933
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
How creditors came to wield unprecedented power over heavily indebted countries—and the dangers this poses to democracy The European debt crisis has rekindled long-standing debates about the power of finance and the fraught relationship between capitalism and democracy in a globalized world. Why Not Default? unravels a striking puzzle at the heart of these debates—why, despite frequent crises and the immense costs of repayment, do so many heavily indebted countries continue to service their international debts? In this compelling and incisive book, Jerome Roos provides a sweeping investigation of the political economy of sovereign debt and international crisis management. He takes readers from the rise of public borrowing in the Italian city-states to the gunboat diplomacy of the imperialist era and the wave of sovereign defaults during the Great Depression. He vividly describes the debt crises of developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s and sheds new light on the recent turmoil inside the Eurozone—including the dramatic capitulation of Greece’s short-lived anti-austerity government to its European creditors in 2015. Drawing on in-depth case studies of contemporary debt crises in Mexico, Argentina, and Greece, Why Not Default? paints a disconcerting picture of the ascendancy of global finance. This important book shows how the profound transformation of the capitalist world economy over the past four decades has endowed private and official creditors with unprecedented structural power over heavily indebted borrowers, enabling them to impose painful austerity measures and enforce uninterrupted debt service during times of crisis—with devastating social consequences and far-reaching implications for democracy.