Suchergebnisse

In addition to introducing and contextualizing the four other contributions to this symposium, this article makes three arguments. Firstly, the Icelandic case has shown up severe weaknesses in the internal market for financial services, including liquidity risk regulation and intergovernmental conflict resolution mechanisms. Echoing Scharpf's analysis of EU decision making, a deep asymmetry has been revealed: It was much easier to grant actors access to each other's domestic markets than to create a pan-European financial regulation creating a clear division of responsibilities and the ability to pool resources and share burdens. The second argument is that political economy has developed a supply-side bias. This has decreased attention to the mechanisms that inject instability into economic performance at the macro level and distribute risk and instability at the level of households and firms. The third point made is that while spectacular boom and bust cycles (reasonably) strengthen the case for less rationalistic micro foundations in the study of economic behaviour, this also entails the risk of losing sight of how perfectly rational (but immoral) financial actors take advantage of their less savvy counter-parties -- be they creditors, shareholders or taxpayers. The article concludes that financial stability is ultimately about governance and therefore about power. Adapted from the source document.

Norway's 'Government Pension Fund' -- Global (GPF-G) is large (around $400b), portfolio oriented and transparent. It tries to be ethical and has been mooted as a role model for other SWFs. The way the GPF-G is set up undergirds the US vision of a financialised world economy and it even indirectly supports US warfare in Iraq by buying treasury bills. It is also a leader in ethical investments -- more than 20 private funds piggyback any divestment decision the GPF-G makes. Understanding the international implications of the GPF-G does not, however, amount to an explanation of why this vehicle was created. This article puts forward the argument that if we want to understand why and how these diverse behaviours cohere into a larger strategic whole, the fund must be interpreted as the continuation and technocratisation of a long established corporatist tradition of foreign economic policy that Peter Katzenstein more than 25 years ago labelled a strategy of flexible adjustment and domestic compensation. Adapted from the source document.

Norway has in the last 25 years experienced one housing market bubble, a severe bust in that housing market, and a new boom that may still prove to be a bubble as well. This article analyses the recommodification of the Norwegian housing market and puts forward three arguments: Firstly, that recommodification has contributed to a severe destabilization of Norway's macroeconomy and may do so again. Secondly, that Norway's growth model is increasingly similar to the American one, in that it is increasingly driven by private consumption based on the creation of new wealth out of the housing-monetary policy nexus. Finally, it discusses the thesis that recommodified housing may well drive politics to the right, albeit very slowly. This can happen partly through the tax reluctance mechanism identified in earlier contributions to the political economy of housing, and partly through a reluctance to spend mediated through a macroeconomic governance regime that engenders support for policies that are perceived to contribute to keeping nominal interest rates low. Adapted from the source document.

Examines policies with systemic ramifications as Sweden, from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, transitioned from a severely regulated & largely insulated credit-based financial system to one that was liberal, competitive, internationalized, & responsive to capital markets. Swedish policymakers, however, largely failed in their priorities during the transition, since asset price inflation & speculative bubbles in real estate & shares led to market crashes that caused a banking crisis comparable to the crash in the 1920s. Policies involved in the macrodestabilization combined with structural maladjustment, considered "foreseeable, avoidable, & blameworthy," included the timing of the tax reform, the uncompromising hard currency stand, & weak precautionary policy. The Swedish rescue operation was costly, but it successfully reestablished a sound financial system. L. A. Hoffman