The new financiers
Banking with Bitcoin, deregulation, and "too big to fail"
This week at Public Seminar, our authors explore entanglements between money and power under neoliberalism.
Paulo L. dos Santos discusses the electronic platforms defining new monetary forms in Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform (Verso, 2023). Basak Kus traces the rollback of consumer regulations in the United States and their replacement with corporate “disclosure” regimes. And Anna Pick reviews Gerald Epstein’s new book, Busting the Bankers' Club: Finance for the Rest of Us (University of California Press, 2024), unpacking Wall Street’s influence on key institutions of American democracy since the New Deal.
Buyer, beware.
The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer
Basak Kus
The ensuing decades saw a proliferation of disclosure regulations designed to equip individuals and families with the knowledge required to effectively navigate markets and sidestep potential risks. As Justice Stephen Breyer explains in his book Regulation and Its Reform, disclosure aligns with an anti-statist ideology and the idea of free markets: “It does not regulate production processes, output, price, or allocation of products. Nor does it restrict individual choice as much as the other classical forms of regulation.” Essentially, it issues a caveat emptor: buyer beware.
From “Boring” to “Roaring” Banking
Anna Pick
This “Wall Street Consensus,” as well as the 2008 crisis mantra that major banks are “too big to fail,” epitomizes the suppression of political imagination that pervades the economics discipline and underpins contemporary parrotings of Margaret Thatcher’s claim that there is “no alternative” to neoliberalism. Epstein argues convincingly that “the threat of a bankers’ strike, a bankers’ exit” is the “ultimate ‘club’ that the bankers hold over our heads.”
Platforms, Payments, and Ponzi Schemes
Paulo L. dos Santos
Electronic platforms can also be thought of as a distinctive type of “terrain” that, like land, can define specific types of revenue and power for those who control them. O’Dwyer lays out the ways companies like Alibaba, Amazon, Twitch, and mobile telephony networks generate revenues by regulating the terms on which tokens exchanged on their platforms trade for legal-tender tokens, and by monetizing information about interactions and transactions taking place in their networks. She also discusses the new forms of social power that platforms define—powers to predict the behavior of their participants, powers of surveillance—and the power to restrict the uses to which any given token may be put.