A sizable literature has documented the complex, often contradictory ways in which finance and space are shot through with each other. This topic finds its origins in an earlier sociology of money; writers as diverse as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Georg Simmel all were concerned with the relations between modernity and commodification. For example, under industrial capitalism and the waves of urbanization it generated, cities arose as sites of new forms of social relations centered on money, leading to a widespread objectification of social relations in which everyone becomes a buyer or a seller.
The Chicago School, particularly Louis Wirth, was appalled by the predatory relations and culture of calculation that pervaded capitalist societies as ever more people were drawn into a money economy. In its broadest sense, therefore, money was instrumental in the time–space compression of capitalism, the formation of the nation-state, and the rise of a global economy. Capitalism without complex systems of finance to lubricate investment and trade is unthinkable. Because money is highly mobile, most attention has focused on the international geography of money and the ways in which money supplies are regulated at the global scale.
Under the Bretton Woods agreement erected by the United States, there was very little exchange rate fluctuation from 1947 to 1971; most currencies were pegged to the US dollar, fluctuating only within 2% within a given year without International Monetary Fund intervention. The dollar, in turn, was pegged to gold (at $35/ounce). The fixed exchange rate system required the free international movement of gold as well as minimal government interventions to offset its effects such as changes in the money supply designed to change real interest rates. The regulations for exchange rates imposed by Bretton Woods were designed largely to avoid the rounds of depreciations that deepened the Great Depression of the 1930s. Under this system of international regulation, currency appreciations or depreciations reflected government fiscal and monetary policies within a system of relatively nationally contained financial markets in which central bank intervention was effective. Trade balances and foreign exchange markets tended to be strongly connected; rising imports caused a currency to decline in value as domestic buyers needed more foreign currency to finance purchases.
The system of stable currencies ended abruptly with the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971 and the shift to floating exchange rates in 1973, reflecting US trade imbalances with its European partners and the overvaluation of the dollar, whose strength was maintained only through a steady outflow of gold. The accumulation of US dollars overseas, which significantly enhanced the growing Euromarket during the 1960s, contributed to an increasingly unviable trade imbalance. Finally, President Richard Nixon announced that the United States no longer would abide by the Bretton Woods rules governing the dollar's convertibility to gold, forcing a global switch to flexible exchange rates. Thereafter, supply and demand would dictate the value of a nation's currency, and currency trading became big business.
The global sea change in capitalism that began with the traumatic petrocrises of the 1970s and massive restructuring of industrialized economies included a fundamental renegotiation of the relations between financial capital and space. Freed from many of the technological and political barriers to movement, capital has become not only mobile but also hypermobile.A key part of this new order was the emergence of what might be called stateless money, which originated in its contemporary form through the Euromarket. Originally, the Euromarket comprised only trade in assets denominated in US dollars but not located in the United States; today, it has spread far beyond Europe and includes all trade in financial assets outside of the country of issue (eg, Eurobonds, Eurocurrencies). One of the Euromarket's prime advantages was its lack of national regulations; unfettered by national restrictions, it has been upheld by neoclassical economists as the model of market efficiency.
Capital markets worldwide were profoundly affected by the microelectronics revolution, which eliminated transactions and transmissions costs for the movement of capital in much the same way as deregulation and the abolition of capital controls decreased regulatory barriers. Banks, insurance companies, and securities firms, which are generally very information intensive in nature, have been at the forefront of the construction of an extensive network of leased and private telecommunications networks, particularly fiber-optics lines. Electronic funds transfer systems form the “nervous system” of the international financial economy, allowing banks to move capital around on a moment's notice, arbitraging interest rate differentials, taking advantage of favorable exchange rates, and avoiding political unrest. Such networks give banks an ability to move money—by some estimates, more than $3 trillion daily—around the globe at stupendous rates. Electronic networks provide the ability to move money around the globe at unprecedented rates (the average currency trade takes less than 25 seconds); subject to the process of digitization, information and capital become two sides of the same coin.
In the securities markets, global telecommunications systems facilitated the steady integration of national capital markets. Electronic trading frees stock analysts from the need for face-to-face interaction to gain information. The National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotation System (NASDAQ), the first fully automated electronic marketplace, is now the world's largest stock market and lacks a trading floor. Online trading allows small investors to trawl the Internet for information, including real-time prices (eroding the advantage once held by specialists such as Reuters), and to execute trades by pushing a few buttons.
The ascendancy of electronic money changed the function of finance from investing to speculating, institutionalizing volatility in the process. Foreign investments, for example, have increasingly shifted from foreign direct investment to intangible portfolio investments such as stocks and bonds, a process that reflects the securitization of global finance. Unlike foreign direct investment, which generates predictable levels of employment, facilitates technology transfer, and alters the material landscape over the long run, financial investments tend to create few jobs and are invisible to all but a few agents, acting in the short run with unpredictable consequences. Furthermore, such funds are provided by nontraditional suppliers; a large and rapidly rising share of private capital flows worldwide no longer is intermediated by banks. Thus, not only has the volume of capital flows increased, but also the composition and institutions involved have changed. Globalization and electronic money had particularly important impacts on currency markets.
Since the shift to floating exchange rates, trading in currencies has become a big business driven by the need for foreign currency associated with rising levels of international trade, the abolition of exchange controls, and the growth of pension and mutual funds, insurance companies, and institutional investors. The world of electronic money has changed not only the configuration and behavior of markets but also the relations of markets to the nation-state. Classic interpretations of the nation-state rested heavily on a clear distinction between the domestic sphere and the international sphere, that is, a world carved into mutually exclusive geographic jurisdictions. State control in this context implies control over territory. In contrast, the rise of electronic money has generated a fundamental asymmetry between the world's economic systems and political systems. Because finance has become so inextricably intertwined with electronic transfers of funds worldwide, it presents the global system of nation-states with unprecedented difficulties in attempting to reap the benefits of international finance while simultaneously attempting to avoid its risks.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق