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Thread: Neoliberalism

  1. #16
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    I am reading Jock Young's book The Exclusive Society (1999). In it he discusses the concept of umwelt in everyday life and the management of risk in late modernity, referring to Irving Goffman and Anthony Giddens, among others: "an attitude of wariness, of calculation and of reflectiveness" (pp.71-76). We all have an awareness of guarding our own personal security. Its a fascinating subject.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Dreamwoven View Post
    At the time liberalism was "reinvented" by President Reagan in the early 1970s no-one thought neoliberalism would have negative consequences. Now, we know know better. The 1929 crash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929 - was matched by the 2007-2008 financial Crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financ..._of_2007–2008:

    "The financial crisis of 2007–2008, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s."
    It is important to remember that many governments baled out their banks in an attempt to save their economies. They were subsequently re-privatised.

    This is something that the citizens of each country must sort out for themselves. But it also makes it easy to neglect what happened. How banks were nationalised at great expense and then re-privatised.

    For more information see:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financ...7%E2%80%932008

    and, of course, the cities of each country need to make their own studies of events in their own country.

  3. #18
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    the US liabilities from the Federal Takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federa...nd_Freddie_Mac. It is just over 5 trillion dollars out of total public debt of 9.5 trillions at the time of the takeover.

  4. #19
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    In November2003 John Laub, in his presidential address to the American Society of Criminology's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado commented: when I entered the field as a graduate student in the 1970s,cfiminology was an exciting field, because people were passionate about ideas. Today "career concerns" are centre-stage,for example, publication counts, citation counts, the amount of external funding generated, departmental rankings, and so forth are the new measures of intellectual impact and scholarship (2004 p.3).

    He talked about ´the golden age of theory` then added, almost soto voce, in a footnote one can ask in all seriousness, "why is so much criminology today boring? Jock Young The Criminological Imagination (p.83)

    Jock Young was caught up in the enthusiasm of the National Deviancy Symposium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation...ancy_Symposium, just as I was. I decided then to apply to an American university and got a studentship at Minnesota University. Kerstin and I went there in 1951, the one place where symbolic interaction was replaced by statistics, after just one first year course. I resigned and we returned to Europe.
    Last edited by Dreamwoven; 04-21-2017 at 10:56 AM. Reason: copied in a large section missing fromm the original.

  5. #20
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    Once back in Sweden we lived in a small flat in Gothenburg. There I went to the Sociology Department and showed the head of department my publications, and registered for the Ph.D. Went back some years later and I wanted to submit my proposal to the Department. It was accepted and I defended it at the viva, made changes to the final manuscript and submitted it: an interactionist approach to macrosociology. It was while in Gothenburg I decided I wanted to do research in housing. This was at the time when neoliberalism was coming to Sweden.

  6. #21
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    Margit Mayer "Whose City? From Ray Pahl's critique of the Keynesian city to the contestations around Neoliberal Urbanism" The Sociological Review vol.65 no. 2, May 2017

    "Since Pahl first explored the ways in which local authorities and their urban managers appropriate and shape cities according to their own rather than residents’ interests, both the ‘who’ and the ‘city’ have become thoroughly redefined. While Pahl could show how the ‘urban managerialism’ of the Fordist city produced territorial inequalities and social exclusions, today’s answers to his original formulation have become rather more complex. This complexity has been revealed by linking the analysis of urban (governance) restructuring with that of movement mobilizations, that is, by considering institutional actors and urban protesters as constituting one and the same field of conflict. Those who own and run ‘the city’ today are no longer only traditional city bosses and their managers, but also global finance capital and other corporate players. And the object of contestation, the city itself, has been redefined as access to ‘the urban’ more in the shape of a global commons than to some central area walled off by insurmountable (and clear) boundaries. At the same time, urban social movements have turned the question ‘whose city?’ into a battle cry for reappropriating what ‘the one percent’ is increasingly denying the ‘99 percent’: the ‘right to the city’, which stands not only for the right to ‘the city we want’ but also for the right to representation and recognition of all who are being disenfranchised and dispossessed by the process of (extended) neoliberal urbanization."
    Last edited by Dreamwoven; 04-22-2017 at 06:00 AM.

  7. #22
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    Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers [/]The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique[/I]

    This book explains clearly and concisely why the market fundamentalists were wrong, all the way down the line. It evaluates the strength of Karl Polanyi's arguments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi. Karl Polany was an Austro-Hungarian, jewish, and fled to England in 1933, thence on to Canada after the war. Block and Somers present Polanyi's ideas. I will be using the coming posts to examine Polanyi's critique.
    Last edited by Dreamwoven; 04-23-2017 at 03:22 AM.

  8. #23
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    One thing I learned from Block and Somers (2014) was how Reaganomics impacted on the US economy. He was not "de-regulating" the market but was continuing the re-regulation started by Jimmy Carter, by shifting the burden of taxation from the super-rich to middle-income and working class earners.

  9. #24
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    "Reagan's re-regulative policies started a dramatic shift of income in favour of the top 1% of households...the share of income going to the top 1% increased from 10% in 1981 to 23.5% in 2007". Much of this shift can be traced to the bold opportunities that Reaganite re-regulation created for Wall Street. Under the new rules, employment and profits in the financial sector grew spectacularly...Dozens of new billionaires suddenly appeared simply by making deals and trading pieces of paper including authorised derivatives such as credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations." (Block and Somers, 2014 p. 20).

  10. #25
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    The Great Transformation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gr...rmation_(book) is the most famous of Polanyi's works. In it he explains the Speenhamland System - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system - as being the response to the hardship caused by the high grain prices in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Much of Block and Somers (2014) deals with this:

    "The sociologists Fred L. Block and Margaret Somers argue that Karl Polanyi's analysis could help explain why the resurgence of free market ideas have resulted in "such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years." They suggest that "the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous" as the idea that Communism will result in the withering away of the state.[12]"

    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gr...rmation_(book) for more information on this, under the heading of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gr...(book)#Support.

  11. #26
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    I looked up on the internet "neoliberal business structures" and was surprised at how many hits I got. The alternatives are many, including taxation, company registering, the nature of profits, who is liable for the company. There are many alternatives.

    Here are some of the links I got:
    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/75118
    Book by David Harvey "A Brief History of Neoliberalism": https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/d...is-resistance/
    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/75118
    http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/neoliberalism.asp

  12. #27
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    Quote Originally Posted by Dreamwoven View Post
    At the time liberalism was "reinvented" by President Reagan in the early 1970s no-one thought neoliberalism would have negative consequences. Now, we know know better. The 1929 crash - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929 - was matched by the 2007-2008 financial Crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financ...07–2008:

    "The financial crisis of 2007–2008, also known as the global financial crisis and the 2008 financial crisis, is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s."
    In this post I want to look closer at the US Housing Bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...housing_bubble and the 2010 US foreclosure crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_U...closure_crisis.

    (1) The US Housing Bubble:

    The United States housing bubble was a real estate bubble affecting over half of the U.S. states. Housing prices peaked in early 2006, started to decline in 2006 and 2007, and reached new lows in 2012.[2] On December 30, 2008, the Case-Shiller home price index reported its largest price drop in its history.[3] The credit crisis resulting from the bursting of the housing bubble is—according to general consensus—the primary cause of the credit default swap bubble of the 2007–2009 recession in the United States.[4]

    (2) The US Foreclosure Crisis:

    The 2010 United States foreclosure crisis, sometimes referred to as Foreclosure-gate or Foreclosuregate,[1][2] refers to a widespread epidemic of improper foreclosures initiated by large banks and other lenders. The foreclosure crisis was extensively covered by news outlets beginning in October 2010, and several large banks, including Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup temporarily responded by halting their foreclosure proceedings in some or all states.[3][4] The foreclosure crisis caused significant investor fear in the U.S.[5] A 2014 study published in the American Journal of Public Health linked the foreclosure crisis to an increase in suicide rates.[6]

    See also the subprime mortgage crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
    Last edited by Dreamwoven; 04-24-2017 at 07:12 AM.

  13. #28
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    Europe also suffered from bank runs, the most dramatic being that of Northern Rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Rock:

    "Northern Rock, formerly the Northern Rock Building Society, was a British bank. It was based at Regent Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. Northern Rock was best known for becoming the first British bank in 150 years to suffer a bank run after having had to approach the Bank of England for a loan facility, to replace money market funding, during the credit crisis in 2007.[2] Having failed to find a commercial buyer, it was taken into public ownership in 2008, and was then bought by Virgin Money in 2012. During 2012 the Northern Rock brand was phased out and replaced by Virgin."

    The EU Financial Crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis

    "The European debt crisis (often also referred to as the Eurozone crisis or the European sovereign debt crisis) is a multi-year debt crisis that has been taking place in the European Union since the end of 2009. Several eurozone member states (Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus) were unable to repay or refinance their government debt or to bail out over-indebted banks under their national supervision without the assistance of third parties like other Eurozone countries, the European Central Bank (ECB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF)."

    The Icelandic Financial Crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–2...nancial_crisis

    "The Icelandic financial crisis was a major economic and political event in Iceland that involved the default of all three of the country's major privately owned commercial banks in late 2008, following their difficulties in refinancing their short-term debt and a run on deposits in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Relative to the size of its economy, Iceland's systemic banking collapse was the largest experienced by any country in economic history.[1] The crisis led to a severe economic depression in 2008–2010 and significant political unrest."

  14. #29
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    On the same day, the Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, made a credit facility of 5 billion Swedish krona (€520 million) available to Kaupthing Bank Sverige AB, the Swedish subsidiary of Kaupthing. The loan was to pay "depositors and other creditors".[71]

    On 9 October, Kaupthing was placed into receivership by the FME, following the resignation of the entire board of directors.[72] The bank said that it was in technical default on its loan agreements after its UK subsidiary had been placed into administration.[73] Kaupthing's Luxembourg subsidiary asked for, and obtained, a suspension of payments (similar to chapter 11 protection) in the Luxembourg District Court.[74] Kaupthing's Geneva office, which was a branch of its Luxembourg subsidiary, was prevented from making any payments of more than 5000 Swiss francs by the Swiss Federal Banking Commission.[75] The directors of Kaupthing's subsidiary on the Isle of Man decided to wind up the company after consultation with the Manx authorities.[76] The Finnish Financial Supervision Authority, Rahoitustarkastus, announced having taken control of Kaupthing's Helsinki branch already on 6th, to prevent money from being sent back to Iceland.[77]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–2...nancial_crisis

    On the same day, the UK Treasury issued a licence under the Landsbanki Freezing Order 2008 to allow the London branch of Landsbanki to continue some business.[78] A second licence was issued on 13 October,[79] when the Bank of England provided a £100 million secured loan to Landsbanki "to help maximise the returns to UK creditors."[80]
    Last edited by Dreamwoven; 04-24-2017 at 11:21 AM.

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