Suchergebnisse

Examines the 1993/94 demonetization of the Russian economy, arguing that it was rooted in basic institutional & political asymmetries between central & local authorities. Analysis focuses on how institutional & political differences between national & local authorities of the electric power & heat sector affected the national drive to move to a money-driven economy. Ethnographic data collected from three regional economies show that the expansion of barter relations was a result of the monetization of the economy. Price liberalization & privatization were followed in 1993 by stabilization involving higher interest rates & taxes that depleted bank accounts, forcing managers to turn to barter relations. It is argued that while barter represented affluence in the socialist state, it now denotes bankruptcy. The political factors involved in the willingness of local authorities to push costs onto the electric power sector are discussed, & the entire process is reexamined in terms of Karl Polanyi's (1965) theory of the "double movement.". 1 Table, 5 Figures, 36 References. J. Lindroth

Robert C. Hockett's "franchise view" argues, convincingly, that the capacity of banks or quasi-bank financial entities to create money rests on the laws, regulations, and guarantees of the state under which they operate. Fred Block advocates the use of this insight as a beachhead for establishing the legitimacy of locally embedded, nonprofit lenders whose investments would be dedicated to public purposes. However, given the pervasive influence of "everyday libertarianism," which fosters blindness to the public character of private economic power, this commentary warns of possible counterproductive consequences of this proposal unless it is fused to the democratization of central banking. An end to central bank independence would highlight the ineliminable role of the state in the market and make that role easier to reshape. It would also end the dynamic whereby monetary easing provides political cover for damaging fiscal austerity and thus lead to better democratic deliberation on the contours of policy.

The Eurozone's reaction to the crisis beginning in late 2008 involved not only efforts to mitigate the arbitrarily destructive effects of markets but also vigorous pursuit of policies aimed at austerity and deflation. To explain this paradoxical outcome, I build on Karl Polanyi's account of a similar deadlock in the 1930s. Polanyi argued that a society-protecting response to malfunctioning markets was limited under the gold standard by the prospect of currency panic, which bankers used to push for austerity, deflationary policies, and labor's political marginalization. I reconstruct Polanyi's "governing by panic" theory to explain Eurozone policy during three key episodes of sovereign bond market panic in 2010–12. By threatening to allow financial panics to continue, the European Central Bank promoted policies and institutional changes aimed at austerity and deflation, limiting the protective response. Germany's Ordoliberalism, and its weight in European affairs, contributed to the credibility of this threat.

In the 1990s, Russia and Argentina both tied their currencies to the dollar to combat inflation. They later devalued under pressure, but only after an extremely costly delay, and only after an explosive spread of monetary surrogates substituting for official currency. This article explains these puzzling developments using an institutional-sociological approach to money, which relates exchange-rate preferences to financial context ("balance sheets") rather than sectoral position, as is common. It proposes a "lock-in" mechanism explaining delayed devaluation in both cases, as well as Argentina's greater delay, and explores the linkages between exchange-rate policy and the origins of monetary surrogates.