Finance, Financialisation and the Crisis presented @ ATN12, Accra, August’09 by Sam Ashman Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development Research Programme University of the Witwatersrand
Overview of Presentation
- Crisis: re-cap on some of the themes covered yesterday
- Financialisation and the relationship between neoliberalism and financialisation
- Experience of South Africa
- Financialisation needs to be set in context of a particular structure of production
- Financialisation in SA helped to produce jobless growth and widening inequality
- Conclusions and alternatives
Deep Structural Crisis
- Triggered in the financial sector
- Sub-prime crisis→fear of toxic debt→ credit crunch→slashing of output, redundancies, collapse in demand
- Spread to real economy, deepest crisis since the 1930s
- Bailouts, discussion of return to New Deal
- Ideological crisis in developed economies
- Debate over the role of the State
Financialisation and Neo-liberalism
- Volatility of short term financial flows increase vulnerability to crisis
- Part of bigger picture of de-regulation as neoliberalism seeks to increase profitability, attack labour
- Entails capital restructuring nationally and internationally
- Developed States act as agents not victims of corporate globalisation
- Inflation targeting; freedom for finance
