Game of Claims: On Speculative Finance and the Social Logic of Leverage

Martijn Konings | December 28, 2021

Martijn Konings in conversation with Erik Bordeleau and Laura Lotti

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Another Speculation is Possible: The Political Lesson of r/WallStreetBets

Michel Feher | February 5, 2021

In the flurry of hot takes on the GameStop adventure, three common features emerge. First, almost everyone agrees, this is so much fun! That a Reddit community of amateur traders could take on a big hedge fund and win – at least temporarily – is cause for a roaring gotcha. Second, the [...]

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Green Structural Adjustment in The World Bank’s Resilient Cities

Patrick Bigger | Sophie Webber | June 16, 2020

Cities across the world are facing a double-barreled existential problem: how to adapt to climate change and how to pay for it. Over the next thirty years, more than 570 coastal cities are poised to face frequent catastrophic flooding owing to sea level rise and more intense storms, while as [...]

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COVID Life and the Asset Economy

Lisa Adkins | Martijn Konings | May 20, 2020

Following the 2007/08 financial crisis the creation of a less unequal and fairer world appeared to be a major prospect. As is by now all too familiar, after the financial crisis, instead of becoming more progressive, societies turned out to be more unequal, with inequalities and asset-based [...]

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Rethinking Microfinance in Post-War Sri Lanka: Mobilisation and Call for Reform

Samanthi Gunawardana | April 14, 2020

“First, it was the tsunami that destroyed our community. Then came the war. Now, it’s microfinance.” — Jesudadan Rajitha, The Federation of Women’s Rural Development Societies.

As the COVID-19 pandemic charts its savage path around the world, it is predicted that [...]

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Facing a liquidity tsunami? Profit, risk, and discipline in emerging markets

Ilias Alami | February 13, 2020

In April 2012, at the White House on her first visit to the United States since her election in 2010, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff scolded advanced capitalist economies for unleashing a ‘tsunami de liquidez’,a ‘liquidity tsunami’, onto the developing world. The expression liquidity [...]

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Podcast: Michele Chihara on ‘Behavioral Economic Masculinity’

Melinda Cooper | December 19, 2019

In August of this year, Los Angeles-based scholar Michelle Chihara delivered a keynote lecture on “The Rise of Behavioral Economic Masculinity” at the University of Sydney as part of the ongoing FutureFix Asset Economy project.

With a hybrid background in journalism, creative [...]

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Microfinance as Poverty-Shame Debt

Susan Engel | November 14, 2019

Microfinance started as a development intervention in the 1970s and by the 1990s it was the next big thing in development. Dramatic claims about its benefits continue to be made, summed up by Irish rock star Bono’s parable: ‘Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman microcredit, [...]

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