Finance
Sydney book launch for Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures
Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber
Where: Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
When: Wednesday 3rd April 2024, 6pm for 6.30 start
RSVP: https://www.gleebooks.com.au/event/gareth-bryant-sophie-webber-climate-finance/
The post Book Launch: Climate Finance appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Neoliberalism changed many things in Australia. Unions are weaker. Inequality is higher. But exactly what changed is often surprising. The state did not shrink. Social spending did not decrease, nor did it become less redistributive. Household wealth has increased rapidly, but largely due to changes in social policy rather than rising productivity.
The relationship between liberalisation and the welfare state is both more central and more complicated than we often imagine. In Politics, Inequality and the Australian Welfare State After Liberalisation I sought to move beyond a lament for declining egalitarianism, and to instead learn from the political strategies that have mitigated and even reduced inequality in hard times.
The book examines case studies from three forms of liberalisation – targeting benefits, marketizing services and financialising the life course. Through each I highlight different models of reform that are broadly consistent with liberalisation (means-testing benefits, facilitating private service providers or using asset-debt relations), yet have different political and distributional consequences.
by Jongchul Kim* In a given era, social scientists often share a common philosophical perspective, whether overtly or implicitly, despite studying different subjects. So what if the prevailing perspective among mainstream economists proves problematic, preventing them from providing a comprehensive understanding of the capitalist financial system?In modern Western philosophy, conventional economics is built upon two […]
Political Economy Seminar
The uncertain foundations of sustainable investing and the politics of risk
Speaker: Dr Claire Parfitt, University of Sydney
Date and time: Tuesday 12 September at 12 noon
Location: Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 650, The University of Sydney
The post Seminar: Claire Parfitt, ‘The uncertain foundations of sustainable investing and the politics of risk’ appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
Change is afoot at the Reserve Bank of Australia. This week the Treasurer announced Michele Bullock will take over from Philip Lowe as Governor of the RBA. Lowe had faced mounting political heat after he abandoned forward guidance given as late as November 2021 that interest rates would not rise until 2024 and joined central banks around the world in rapidly hiking interest rates.
One of Bullock’s first tasks will be to oversee the implementation of the recommendations of the Review into the RBA released in March 2023. Most attention about the Review has focused on its proposed structural changes to the RBA, which would create separate boards for monetary policy decisions and institutional governance. This change will bring the RBA in line with many of its international peers. Last week, outgoing Governor Philip Lowe announced initial steps towards implementing this recommendation.
COVID-19 temporarily re-made fiscal politics. States responded to the health threat by enacting a sudden and far-reaching contraction of the private sector, partly compensated by an unprecedented expansion of the public sector. The moves proved temporary, with a swift return to fiscal and monetary constraint. However, the COVID response potentially provides lessons for understanding broader changes in capitalism.
In part I of our post, we used Schumpeter’s theory of the tax state to trace how changes in the organisation of capitalism had their ‘fiscal reflection’ in changing fiscal accounting practices. In this part II of our discussion of the tax state, based on a journal article recently published in Critical Perspectives on Accounting, we identify a new set of ‘hybrid’ fiscal tools, built prior to, but used during COVID, that could point to a more enduring shift in fiscal politics beyond neoliberalism [...]
The coming federal budget, to be tabled in May, would be Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ first opportunity to build what he calls “values-based capitalism”.
In an essay published in The Monthly, Chalmers envisions an Australian capitalism that is not defined by just one notion of value (presumably economic value), but by values, or “our (Australian) values”.
The post Values-based capitalism, or financial value-based government? appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
As groups like the Finance and Society Network make clear, banking and finance are too important to be left to financial economists and industry lobbyists. We all need to take some interest in what the powerful do and how they do it. These days this also extends to the huge ecosystem of alternative finance, fintech and decentralised finance (DeFi). Most people’s experience of this at the moment probably extends little further than lurid headlines trumpeting the huge sums made and lost (currently mainly lost) in cryptocurrency. There is, however, a lot more at stake than one might at first think.
Like any focus of fevered speculative activity, cryptocurrency has attracted its fair share of hyperbole and misinformation. In a recent paper in Cambridge Journal of Economics I try to look past this and consider the multiple issues involved.
The post The future of money and banking’s crypto reserve drain problem appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).