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"Rethel, Lena"
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The problem with banks
A concise, essential overview of a pressing global issue, The Problem with Banks examines banking activity in America, Asia and Europe, and how specific historical circumstances have transformed banks' behaviour and attitude to risk.
eBook
Curated Power: The Performative Politics of (Industry) Events
Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increased interest in the social performance of power in international political sociology. At the same time, recent years have seen the growing popularity of event ethnographic research approaches. In this article, we develop the concept of “curated power” as a tool to explore the performative enactment of power at and through conferences and events. A focus on curated power, we argue, can orient scholars of performative power toward conferences and events as an analytical entry point, and orient event ethnographic approaches toward the performance of classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies as a central research concern. To develop these points, and to illustrate the analytical purchase of the concept, we provide a concrete example of its application by analyzing the performative enactment of social hierarchies at industry events in two alternative financial subsectors: FinTech and Islamic finance. In both sectors, we show that curated power can provide a situated and nuanced understanding of why and how corporate efforts to change finance for the better—whether on the basis of religious principles or advanced technological capabilities—often remain complicit in perpetuating classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies.
Journal Article
Whose legitimacy? Islamic finance and the global financial order
Islamic finance is a fast growing segment of international financial markets. Deriving its core principles from the Quran and the Sharia, the objective of Islamic finance is to install a more equitable financial and economic order that at the same time is transaction-friendly. Thus, Islam could be seen as a foundation for the inclusion of the ethical and moral dimensions of economics and markets. This coincides with rising demand for Islamic financial products. Indeed, recent years have witnessed increasing efforts to develop and to institutionalise Islamic capital markets and above all, to make Islamic finance acceptable (and thus investable) to the mainstream. In this article, I use the question of legitimacy to explore whether Islamic finance offers an alternative to the existing international financial order. To this end, I take a closer look at the knowledge base from which Islamic financial products are constructed and assessed as well as the emerging international regulatory framework for Islamic financial markets. I conclude that efforts to expand the social constituency of Islamic finance to the transnational sphere of global finance are overly focused on its epistemic legitimation as normal financial activity. As a consequence, the currently emerging power, knowledge and governance structures for Islamic finance tend to emulate, and therefore largely reproduce, the existing global financial order.
Journal Article
Financial structure and the development of domestic bond markets in emerging economies
In the period from the 1990s emerging market financial crises until the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008, the development of domestic bond markets in developing economies was a prominent agenda item in international financial reform circles. The crises of the 1990s drew attention to the vulnerabilities generated by frequently occurring double mismatches of currency denominations and maturities in the borrowing of emerging economies. This led to a series of reform efforts targeted at both increasing liquidity and the range of borrowers in domestic bond markets. In the aggregate, these efforts were successful: For emerging market economies as a whole, domestic debt now exceeds international debt. Moreover, domestic corporate bond markets have emerged in many countries, often for the first time. However, the nature of market development has been far from uniform, and often has not been in line with government aims. In this paper, we examine the interplay of government and business actors in market development. Drawing on 155 interviews with policy and market actors as well as secondary data, we show that the main explanation of variation in market development lies in the pre-existing structure of financial markets, conceptualized as a heterogeneous set of interest/influence constellations.
Journal Article
Sexy money: the hetero-normative politics of global finance
The article develops a critical analysis of gendered narratives of global finance. The post-subprime crisis equation of unfettered global finance with the excessive masculinity of individual bankers is read in line with a wider gender narrative. We discuss how hetero-normative relations between men and women underpin financial representations through three historical examples: war bond advertising, Hollywood films about bankers, and contemporary aesthetic representations of female politicians who advocate for austerity. A politics emerges whereby gender is used to encompass a/the spectrum between embedded and disembedded finance, approximate to the divide between oikonomia and chrematistics. The apparently desirable ‘marriage’ between the state and finance that ensues carries several ambiguities – precisely along gender lines – that point to a pervasive limit: the myth of embedded liberalism in the imagination of global finance.
Journal Article
Conceptualizing dynamic challenges to global financial diffusion: Islamic finance and the grafting of sukuk
Following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009, there has been renewed interest in the diffusion and pluralization of financial ideas and practices, and in understanding how new ideas and practices can emerge to challenge the prevalence and diffusion of dominant ones. However, existing concepts and language in the broader literature on diffusion limit our ability to analyze and assess the contestation of ideas, especially as it is sustained and transformed over time. In this paper, we develop the concept of grafting as a post-equilibrium approach to analyze the ongoing contestation of global finance at the level of market practice. We apply our conceptual framework to analyze the complex dynamics of a class of financial assets that in recent years has made significant inroads in global financial markets: sukuk, often referred to as Islamic bonds. We highlight dynamic differences in the grafting of ideas and practices from Islam and conventional finance and suggest that the grafting of sukuk is an ongoing contestation of the diffusion of global finance that contributes to the emergence of an increasingly pluralistic global economy.
Journal Article
Conflicts of Interest in Financial Intermediation
The last years have seen a surge of scandals in financial intermediation. This article argues that the agency structure inherent to most forms of financial intermediation gives rise to conflicts of interest. Though this does not excuse scandalous behavior it points out market imperfections. There are four types of conflicts of interest: personal-individual, personal-organizational, impersonal-individual, and finally, impersonal-organizational conflicts. Analyzing recent scandals we find that all four types of conflicts of interest prevail in financial intermediation.
Journal Article
Local bond markets, financial development and the new politics of debt in malaysia
This doctoral thesis investigates the transition from a bank-based to a capital marketbased financial system that has taken place in Malaysia over the last two decades. In so doing, it more closely traces Malaysian financial policymaking processes, specifically efforts to develop domestic bond markets since the mid-1980s. Based on recent insights from the constructivist political economy literature and drawing on a wide range of Malaysian policy documents as well as elite interviews, it argues that the shift which has taken place can only be understood against the backdrop of the changing ideational underpinnings of financial policymaking. Neoliberal economic reforms that were implemented in the 1980s served as a powerful rationale for pro-capital market reforms. However, this thesis detects a qualitative change within the market paradigm after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8, away from simply rolling out markets towards institutionbuilding. This led to increased efforts to develop local bond markets. Furthermore, this thesis suggests that the expansion of bond finance in Malaysia has entailed larger socio-economic changes which can be subsumed under the notion of financialisation. A number of examples are presented in the thesis. More specifically, the increasing salience of bond finance has given rise to a new politics of debt, as debt has become successively privatised and individualised. However, progressive financial disintermediation in Malaysia has also changed the underlying dynamics of Malaysian capitalism more generally in favour of a greater market orientation. Contrary to existing accounts on the role of bond finance, it is argued that policy autonomy is not so much directly constrained by market forces, as by the pervasive hold that specific forms of (financial) market knowledge have taken in the state apparatus. However, the rise of Islamic finance in Malaysia will be discussed to illustrate that a small developing country can retain some epistemic autonomy.
Dissertation