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ow have we arrived at an era of easy money? What role do central banks play and how has their relationship with finance changed over the years? Do central banks offer more stability to avoid crises? How is the rise of central banks more problematic than expected? Leon Wansleben provides answers in his new book.

When so much has been written about central banks, one might question what there is more to know. Wansleben goes over previously ignored original sources in extensive archival work and interviews for his research to uncover the practices of central banking, its relationship with finance, and accounts of the origin and consequences of the dominance of central banks in economic policy.

For a long time central banks mattered as managers of the international currency order, but they were not the key movers and centers of power. That began to change in the 1970s with the rising inflation, and since then central banks have greatly increased their influence. In The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism, Wansleben provides a history and explanation of this rise and why it matters.

Central banks have been expected to be beacons of stability, and in the 1990s and 2010s, they assumed even larger responsibilities. However, global finance has experienced many rocky turns and crises over the years; the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic being two major ones ingrained in our memory. What seems to be going wrong with the equation?

Could central banks’ policies be counterintuitively destabilizing? It turns out, yes. As central banks became dominant, their policy innovations allowed them to use privileged relationships with expanding financial markets to govern the economy. But, by relying on markets, central banks fostered excessive credit growth and cultivated an unsustainable version of capitalism.

How has this change occurred? Many commentators argue that ideas, mainly concerned with controlling inflation, drove change and shifted economics from Keynesianism to monetarism. Others point to the stagflation crises, which saw capitalists and workers in dispute, redistributing power from elected governments to markets and central banks as capitalists pushed deregulation and disinflation. Central banks became the advocates and executers of “hard money” policies.

Wansleben looks introspectively within the central banks themselves, as they are both bureaucratic bodies and banking organizations that operate in private markets, and combines these approaches with the evolving practices of central banking to explain how we arrived at an era of excessive finance. He compares developments in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Switzerland to find that central bankers’ policy innovations were an important ingredient of change.

The Rise of Central Banks provides a political economy and sociological perspective on how bureaucrats innovate tools, how these tools are woven into the fabrics of economic structures and generate infrastructural power for particular state organizations, and how such intertwinements produce both intended and unintended effects. The Rise of Central Banks shines light on the agency of bureaucrats and calls upon society and elected leaders to direct these actors’ efforts toward more progressive goals.

Leon Wansleben, The Rise of Central Banks: State Power in Financial Capitalism (Harvard University Press, 2023) ISBN 9780674270510, 352 pages

Is information technology accelerating creative destruction? How are large corporations counter-intuitively shooting the capitalist system in the foot? And how do we fix it? In The New Goliaths: How Corporations Use Software to Dominate Industries, Kill Innovation, and Undermine Regulation, James Bessen makes a compelling argument that competition, which has fueled innovation and progress under capitalism, is now threatened by powerful corporate giants like Walmart, Amazon, and Google.

Is technology to blame? In the digital age, software has allowed the increase of efficiency, variety, and flexibility, with far-reaching results in the economy. Yet, only the top firms and their high-level employees have access to key frontier technologies. Indeed, one can observe this trend amidst the mass purge of employees from these top firms. How did this change come about? Bessen dives into the topic of how earlier technologies leveled the competition and its benefits, and what is causing the disruption now.

One could argue that competing with big businesses is easier now than ever before with information technology becoming more affordable and more accessible; however, The New Goliaths points out that on the economic scale, it is the changing nature of how economic actors use information that makes a crucial impact.

“With great economic power came opportunities for abuse and political corruption,” Bessen writes and shows how these giants have tilted the odds in their favor by using proprietary information technologies. Over the years, these “new goliaths” have evaded regulation, slowed innovation, and increased economic inequality and social division. In turn, they have harmed workers, consumers, and citizens, and fueled politics of resentment.

The saying “Money makes the world go round” takes a more powerful meaning in a globalized capitalist economy. But what happens when the ones at the very top of the money chain are corrupted? In this month’s book bundle, we share with you three books that explore the influence of the rich and powerful, discuss how the world really goes round, and expose the staggering cases of how corruption hides itself often in plain sight with its effects rippling into the depth of systems, societies, and the lives of each one of us.

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he COVID19 pandemic revealed to many an eye-opening trend of wealth centralization: the rich are getting richer, and governments around the world are hardly able to protect those who are most vulnerable from the detrimental economic and social effects of a crisis. Who is the culprit?

The New York Times‘s award-winning global economics journalist Peter S. Goodman presents a page-turning exposé of the global billionaire class, the “Davos Man,” and its hostile takeover of the world. Davos Man documents billionaires’ exploitation of the COVID19 pandemic, which turned “taxpayer-financed bailout packages into corporate welfare schemes.” This global billionaire class instrumentalized its power to conceal the truth by hiring lobbyists, PR managers, and journalists in media.

Furthermore, Goodman uncovers the concealed impacts of their oligarchic control reaching into every branch of society and modern life, from wages to housing, healthcare to everyday products and taxation. He argues that their systematic plunder ultimately destabilized democracy by widening wealth inequality, leaving governing systems vulnerable, and triggering the rise of anti-democratic nationalism. He provides the answer to the problem of wider context: how did the liberal democratic order become a breeding ground for the right-wing hate?

Goodman not only provides a vividly written description of the realm of the ultra-rich but more importantly the realities of those who are dissipated by their appropriation all around the world including accounts from a blue-collar worker in Buenos Aires, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a doctor in Seattle during the COVID19 pandemic, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, and an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City. Davos Man is a must-read for those concerned about inequality, economic justice, the resilience of societies, democracy, and the great challenges of our time.

Peter S. Goodman, Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World (Custom House 2022) ISBN: 9780063078314, 472 pages

The anonymous leak of the Panama Papers in 2016 revealed millions of financial and legal documents that show how ultra-high-net-worth individuals hide their money using complex webs of offshore vehicles. How were these structures set and who plays a role?

Spiderweb Capitalism uncovers the shadow economy and the mechanics behind the illicit movement of wealth across borders through the invisible, complex networks of lawyers, accountants, company secretaries, and fixers.

Sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang traveled the globe to follow the money through a web-like supersystem and conducted hundreds of in-depth interviews with these ultra-high-net-worth individuals, private wealth managers, fund managers, entrepreneurs, C-suite executives, bankers, auditors, and other financial professionals to find an answer.

Hoang reveals the strategies behind spiderweb capitalism and examines the moral dilemmas of making money in legal, financial, and political gray zones as she traces the flow of capital from offshore funds in places like the Cayman Islands, Samoa, and Panama to special-purpose vehicles and holding companies in Singapore and Hong Kong and risky markets in Vietnam and Myanmar. How are these smaller markets interconnected in a broader system of global capitalism?

Spiderweb Capitalism sheds critical light on how global elites capitalize on risky frontier markets.  Hoang argues that spiderweb capitalism explains the rapid rise of foreign capital in risky markets with low levels of trust and cooperation. Economic growth in such markets is a consequence of tightly embedded relations between the economic elite and political elites that result in a variety of corruptions.

Contrary to the “economic mantra that development can only occur in economies with a strong rule of law,” Spiderweb Capitalism shows a paradox of global economic growth sustained through states where the line separating the legal from the corrupt is not always clear. Hoang’s research further reveals that old paradigms like First World/Third World and Global North/Global South are no longer useful for framing the global economy.

Spiderweb Capitalism is a unique and worthwhile read, not only uncovering the dynamics of a global system of corruption but also the sociological backgrounds of playing in the grey.

Kimberly Kay Hoang, Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press 2022) ISBN: 9780691229119, 288 pages

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n Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy, activist Dr. Vandana Shiva compiles essays and articles from more than 20 authors and organizations to show how ruthless capitalistic exploitation branded as philanthropic altruism forges a direct path to global destruction. According to David Orr, philanthrocapitalists are those who “promise to solve hunger, disease, poverty, and a rapidly destabilizing climate often by selling us more of the same things that made them very rich,” which oftentimes ignores the root causes and inequities.

How do global capitalists wield philanthropy to monopolize and privatize land use, food production, and the public health sector effectively? Through various initiatives, suborganizations, development schemes, and funding mechanisms. The book points out that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s empire, in particular, is an intricate network of power and influence solidified by targeted and well-financed PR campaigns to shape public opinion in pursuit of profit and market expansion.

Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy criticizes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and similar organizations’ many privileged relationships with private companies, governments, and the World Health Organization that allow them exclusively to set the global agenda on health. The book argues that simplified solutions based on technical and scientific developments introduced by these organizations are often narrow in scope and remain insufficient in solving complex problems. Furthermore, they corrode the integrity of democratic institutions guised under a banner of future-oriented innovation.

Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy reveals the destructive power of overly capitalistic systems that enable mass human suffering and environmental catastrophe via the entanglement of private investment and public policy, and aims to bring forward democratic discussions about transparency, accountability, and inclusivity.

Vandana Shiva, Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizen’s Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture (Synergetic Press 2022) ISBN: 9780907791911, 240 pages

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n his book Growth for Good: Reshaping Capitalism to Save Humanity from Climate Catastrophe, Alessio Terzi, an economist at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs and lecturer at Sciences Po, examines the concerns of the degrowth movement which challenges one of the most fundamental components of a capitalist economy: economic growth. He takes the ideas that are rather idealistic and injects them with a dose of pragmatism to explain how growth once more can be a force for good.

Terzi initially strikes a balance between opposing views. He acknowledges the value of the degrowth movement’s arguments, addresses the parts in which they fall short, and lays out the tools that are effective. Growth for Good emphasizes innovation and how capitalism allows it to thrive; however, it also underlines the parts of a capitalist economy that need adjustment in order to take action to combat climate change now.

What is remarkable about the book is its refreshing approach that encourages the reader to keep an open mind. It offers more than an argumentative and sterilized defense of a point of view: it is a genuine yet refined thought process leading into Terzi’s blueprint for an executable agenda allowing the reader to easily follow and absorb the concepts that he highlights in the book. Growth for Good does not only preach about innovation, it embodies innovation in the way it communicates.

In Growth for Good innovation is the key to solving the climate crisis. How does innovation come into play when addressing the concerns of environmental activists?

In the chapter I have on innovation itself and how innovation comes about, I explain that innovation responds to what is perceived as a need. So, the very definition of innovation itself, how it manifests, why certain innovations develop at certain points in time, and whether they are developed and utilized depends on need.

The invisible hand is an important concept in economics for responding to needs, but we can’t seem to get that response when it comes to the environment. Why is that?

The invisible hand in a capitalist system is the price mechanism. The price mechanism doesn’t work because for a very long time we’ve treated the environment as an endless bucket where we could shove our trash. Therefore, there was no pricing for any of these things, and the invisible hand doesn’t do its job at all.

Why would change happen now?

Why this process of transformation will happen is that luckily, we see growing concern about climate change and environmental awareness in people, which wasn’t the case for a very long time. I think that that is the first step which triggers a domino effect throughout society.

Whereas it’s very important to have pioneers who are environmentally aware at an earlier stage, I’m not waiting for a moment in which the whole of society becomes environmentally driven and thinks that one must prioritize the planet over personal needs. Rather, I am waiting for the moment where the cheap option and the green option coincide, and I think that we’re starting to see this increasingly.

For example, when people and governments are willing to invest in greener modes of transport such as electric cars, companies see opportunities for profits. They respond to the opportunity and scale up their production and the costs for these technologies fall. Then, these technologies can spread across society, including people with fewer financial means.

If we want to look for a spark of optimism, these green technologies will not spread linearly but exponentially. Once we reach tipping points, they will spread very fast. We are seeing these developments with renewable energy sources and with a variety of new technologies which are going to be crucial in a green economy.

In your book you warn of a rebound effect for developing countries. Do you think there is enough time to prevent a tip over that would cause us to lose the climate race?

The climate is changing fast, and we are potentially experiencing the tipping points that you are hinting at from a climate, environmental perspective. We have technology and innovation on the other side of the race, which again will experience positive tipping points in terms of acceleration of deployment – that is the component that we’re trying to define.

I am often asked, “Are we going to win against climate change?” It is a bit of an odd question to me, because the climate is already changing. So, to some extent we will experience some of these changes, such as extreme weather events. Their frequency will increase. That’s a fact because they are already baked into the atmosphere. What we will do is try to use innovation to contrast these effects.

I am often framed as an optimist in the fact that I believe that the innovation push can happen, and it can happen fast, but I don’t want to overplay my optimism in the sense that all our problems will magically be solved equally and everywhere. I think that the decades ahead will be a rough period of transition and adjustment.

What is the blueprint that Growth for Good offers?

Economic growth as it is right now leads to CO2 emissions, a linear way of consumption, and therefore pollution of various sorts, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Economic growth can once again be a force for good – that’s where the blueprint comes into play. It requires action from a variety of actors in society.

There is a lot that governments can do in terms of regulation such as taxing carbon, carbon pricing, and penalizing certain behaviors like bans on single-use plastic. Furthermore, governments should put together big plans and invest in infrastructure for a green economy. With respect to industrial policy, governments should invest in research and development for new ways to decarbonize industry. Meanwhile, there is also a lot businesses and consumers can and should do. The blueprint comes together only if all these actors act at the same time, and no single one can work it out on its own.

What would be the most defining factor for saving humanity from a climate catastrophe?

My view rests on the idea that green technologies can be made cheaper. It is not a potential abstract concept, but something that you can see and measure. The degree and speed in which this happens is going to be the most crucial factor. So, observing how fast these technologies develop and cost curves go down will be defining whether we end up on the winning or the losing side of the race with climate change.

An “emerging market (EM) economy” is the economy of a developing country that is becoming more engaged with global markets as it grows. Countries named as EM economies are those with some of the characteristics of a developed market. EMs have the features of increased liquidity in equity markets, increased trade and foreign direct investment, and modern financial institutions. About 20 countries are classified as emerging economies although there are differences among them.

EM countries include Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Inflation is the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising. The Keynesian school believes that inflation results from economic pressures such as rising costs of production or increases in aggregate demand. In cost-push inflation, production costs rise on an economy-wide level because of mainly increases in input prices, and this can lead to increased consumer prices throughout the whole economy, as producers pass on their increased costs to consumers.

Demand-pull inflation occurs when aggregate demand exceeds aggregate supply, and thus prices increase economy-wide. Built-in inflation is a type of inflation that results from past events and persists at the present. It then becomes a normal aspect of the economy, via inflationary expectations and the price/wage spiral. According to the monetarist view, the expansion of the money supply is the principal cause of inflation. Economists from these schools disagree on the root causes of inflation, although they underscore the fact that inflation is a far more complex phenomenon.

The ratio of food expenditure in all consumer spending is higher in EMs compared to developed economies. This ratio, for example, is about 26% in Turkey and 13% in the U.S., which are EM and developed economies respectively. Food inflation occurs when the food consumer price index (CPI) exceeds headline CPI. For example, in September 2021, the yearly increase in Turkey’s food CPI was 28.8% while the increase in headline CPI was 19.6%. Food inflation exists in almost all EMs, and thus increases headline inflation.

What does inflation look like in EMs?

Consumer prices are increasing in both developed and EM economies. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects inflation will accelerate to 2.4% in 2021 from 0.7% in 2020 in developed countries and to 5.4% from 5.1% in EMs. Rising food and energy prices, pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, and surging shipping costs are among the determinants. In recent years, inflation has been very low in rich countries while it has been high in poorer countries. Basic necessities such as food and energy typically account for a bigger part of household spending, so current developments can lead to hardships for people.

The increase was modest and prudent, raising rates from 0.1% to 0.5%. Central banks have less breathing room to wait and see whether price rises and supply bottlenecks are temporary. The Polish rate was 5.8% in September 2021 which is the highest in 20 years. It is closer to double figures in Brazil and Mexico, where in September the core inflation rate accelerated to the fastest rate since 2017. These higher rates of inflation are partly because food accounts for a larger proportion of consumption.

Several local factors affect food inflation, and the causes of higher prices have not been homogenous across EM economies. Inflation in items like fruit and vegetables in particular seems to vary across markets, due to local factors and the climatic conditions for such products. In its April 2021 report, the IMF estimated that the annual pass-through from international food prices to the domestic food CPI was much higher for middle- and low-income countries than for high-income countries.

This means that the impact on headline inflation is higher in EMs since food has a larger share in CPI baskets. Food items in the U.S., the Euro zone, and Turkey are about 13%, 17%, and 26% of CPI baskets respectively. This is particularly true for countries such as Turkey, Brazil, Russia, and countries in Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa where food inflation remains significantly above headline inflation.

Economic and political impact of inflation in EMs

Inflation is a kind of tax on the poor. This is possibly why central banks in EMs are acting against the price pressures caused by the rising costs of oil, food, and other goods and services. EM central banks do not have the luxury of waiting. Many EMs have kicked off interest rate cycles even before their economies recover from the pandemic.

According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, food prices increased 40% over the previous 15 months, the biggest increase since 2011. The IMF forecasts inflation rates to peak at 6.8% in EM economies before falling to about 4% next year. In contrast, advanced economies are likely to experience inflation that is more modest: peaking at 3.6% in autumn 2021, before falling to 2%.