The financial market turmoil in 2007 and 2008 has led to the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression and threatens to have large repercussions on the real economy The bursting of the housing bubble forced banks to write down several hundred billion dollars in bad loans caused by mortgage delinquencies At the same time, the stock market capitalization of the major banks declined by more than twice as much While the overall mortgage losses are large on an absolute scale, they are still relatively modest compared to the $8 trillion of US stock market wealth lost between October 2007, when the stock market reached an all-time high, and October 2008 This paper attempts to explain the economic mechanisms that caused losses in the mortgage market to amplify into such large dislocations and turmoil in the financial markets, and describes common economic threads that explain the plethora of market declines, liquidity dry-ups, defaults, and bailouts that occurred after the crisis broke in summer 2007 To understand these threads, it is useful to recall some key factors leading up to the housing bubble The US economy was experiencing a low interest rate environment, both because of large capital inflows from abroad, especially from Asian countries, and because the Federal Reserve had adopted a lax interest rate policy Asian countries bought US securities both to peg the exchange rates at an export-friendly level and to hedge against a depreciation of their own currencies against the dollar, a lesson learned from the Southeast Asian crisis of the late 1990s The Federal Reserve Bank feared a deflationary period after the bursting of the Internet bubble and thus did not counteract the buildup of the housing bubble At the same time, the banking system underwent an important transformation The

/pdf/deciphering-the-liquidity-and-credit-crunch-2007-2008-3612pahtil.pdf

Deciphering the Liquidity and Credit Crunch 2007-2008

The newest “new institutionalism,” discursive institutionalism, lends insight into the role of ideas and discourse in politics while providing a more dynamic approach to institutional change than the older three new institutionalisms. Ideas are the substantive content of discourse. They exist at three levels—policies, programs, and philosophies—and can be categorized into two types, cognitive and normative. Discourse is the interactive process of conveying ideas. It comes in two forms: the coordinative discourse among policy actors and the communicative discourse between political actors and the public. These forms differ in two formal institutional contexts; simple polities have a stronger communicative discourse and compound polities a stronger coordinative discourse. The institutions of discursive institutionalism, moreover, are not external-rule-following structures but rather are simultaneously structures and constructs internal to agents whose “background ideational abilities” within a given “meanin...

/pdf/discursive-institutionalism-the-explanatory-power-of-ideas-2x76ola04b.pdf

Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse

The third way: the renewal of social democracy

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market-oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post-1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market-oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways

The concept of power is central to international relations. Yet disciplin- ary discussions tend to privilege only one, albeit important, form: an actor control- ling another to do what that other would not otherwise do. By showing conceptual favoritism, the discipline not only overlooks the different forms of power in inter- national politics, but also fails to develop sophisticated understandings of how global outcomes are produced and how actors are differentially enabled and constrained to determine their fates. We argue that scholars of international relations should employ multiple conceptions of power and develop a conceptual framework that encourages rigorous attention to power in its different forms. We first begin by producing a tax- onomy of power. Power is the production, in and through social relations, of effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their circumstances and fate. This general concept entails two crucial, analytical dimensions: the kinds of social rela- tions through which power works (in relations of interaction or in social relations of constitution); and the specificity of social relations through which effects are pro- duced (specific/direct or diffuse/indirect). These distinctions generate our taxonomy and four concepts of power: compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive. We then illustrate how attention to the multiple forms of power matters for the analysis of global governance and American empire. We conclude by urging scholars to beware of the idea that the multiple concepts are competing, and instead to see connections between them in order to generate more robust understandings of how power works in international politics.

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Power in international politics

The identification of infrequent side-effects of clotting factor concentrates, undetected by clinical trials, is facilitated by post-marketing surveillance. We present a post-marketing surveillance study in which 97 patients with haemophilia A, attending three haemophilia centres, were treated over a median follow-up period of 284 days (range 1-1074), and a total follow-up period of 30,080 days, with a pasteurized immunoaffinity purified factor VIII concentrate (Monoclate-P, Armour, Collegeville, USA). 5216 infusions, using 10,527,000 units of Monoclate-P, were carried out, mostly for routine haemarthroses or prophylaxis. No new inhibitors were observed during the study. At the start of the study 60/97 were HIV seropositive, 67/97 HBs antibody positive, 12 HbsAb negative and the remainder HBsAb positive before the study period. 13/14 tested were HAV seropositive at the beginning of the study. One patient became HAV seropositive during the study period, an infection thought to be community acquired. No other seroconversions were observed. Only one mild transfusion reaction was observed. This study confirms the safety and efficacy of Monoclate-P. Post-marketing surveillance or nationally organized pharmaco-vigilance should be practiced more widely to enable identification of low-frequency side-effects of treatment.

A post-marketing safety and efficacy assessment of a monoclonal antibody purified high-purity factor VIII concentrate.

That political scientists remain divided by the common language of power is perhaps testimony to the centrality of the concept to political analysis. Indeed, for many, political analysis can be defined quite simply as the analysis of the nature, exercise and distribution of power (Dahl 1963; Duverger 1964/66; Lasswell 1936/50; M. Weber 1919/46; and, for a more recent view, Goodin and Klingemann 1996). For those who adopt such a view the definition of power serves to circumscribe the parameters of political analysis. Given this, it is perhaps unremarkable that the concept of power has attracted quite so much attention, contention and controversy. How is power distributed? Is it repressive or constitutive? Is it best conceptualised in purely structural terms or as a capacity of agents? Or, indeed, is it better conceived as a resource conferred upon actors by the context in which they find themselves? Is the identification of a power relation an analytical or a normative exercise? Is the identification of an inequality of power itself sufficient to imply a normative critique of those identified as possessing ‘power over’? Can power be exercised responsibly? Can the powerful be held to account? Should power be counterposed to freedom and autonomy? Is a liberation from relations of power possible and/or desirable? These and other fundamental questions continue to divide political analysts, as we shall see. They form the subject of this chapter.

Divided by a Common Language? Conceptualising Power

In the Working Paper, we have sought to outline our thinking on a very large and complex undertaking; namely the assessment of the ways in which the Thatcher governments of the 1980s may have had quite unintended consequences on crime via some of the policies which they set about pursuing for quite separate reasons, but which, nevertheless contributed to amongst other things, the upswing in crime in the 1980s. Our thinking is not heavily informed by theories commonly examined by criminologists; instead our thinking about both the causal antecedents of these governments and their approach to re-engineering society, and the causal antecedents of crime are informed by thinking inspired by historical institutionalist scholars writing within political science, and sociological and economic theories of crime causation.

https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.339300!/file/WorkingPaper1HistoricalInstitutionalism.pdf

Using Ideas Derived from Historical Institutionalism to Illuminate the Long-Term Impacts on Crime of 'Thatcherite' Social and Economic Policies: A Working Paper

Throughout this volume on institutions and crisis, there have been a number of comparisons drawn between the 1970s and the present day. Yet, one of the paradoxes to emerge during the course of the 1970s was the extent to which, while a sense of both political and economic crisis particularly in the latter stages of that decade loomed large, many of the institutions explored in this volume were at the same time still robustly defended. Indeed, for those with long memories, a popular refrain, not exclusive to the political class, was that ‘Britain had the best armed forces, police force, judiciary, civil service [or any of the above] in the world’. Supporting evidence substantiating such claims was mainly conspicuous by its absence and was more often than not the product of a still lingering imperial superiority.

Colin Hay

Papers

A post-marketing safety and efficacy assessment of a monoclonal antibody purified high-purity factor VIII concentrate.

Divided by a Common Language? Conceptualising Power

Using Ideas Derived from Historical Institutionalism to Illuminate the Long-Term Impacts on Crime of 'Thatcherite' Social and Economic Policies: A Working Paper

Conclusion: Après le Deluge? Crisis, Continuity and Change in UK Institutions

The center in British politics has all but disappeared, leaving the country as polarized as the U.S.