From Watts to Wall Street

We study the reform of financial regulation initiated by the Dodd—Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. Major factors impeding Obama’s financial and economic policy are explored, including institutional difficulties, party warfare, lobbyism, and systemic inconsistencies of international financial regulation. We also examine challenges that are being faced by economic and political sciences due to the changes in financial regulation and also assess the level of radicality of the financial reform.

Download Full-text

Reading the Image of Race: Neurocriminology, Medical Imaging Technologies and Literary Intervention

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474400046.003.0013 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Lindsey Andrews ◽

Jonathan M. Metzl

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Wall Street Journal ◽

Genetic Basis ◽

Three Dimensional ◽

Criminal Behaviour ◽

Dominant Model ◽

Wall Street ◽

Behavioural Genetics ◽

Black And White ◽

Brain Scan

On 26 April 2013, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by neurocriminologist Adrian Raine promoting his newest book, The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime. On the newspaper’s website, an image of a black-and-white brain scan overlaid with handcuffs headed the essay. Clicking ‘play’ turned the image into a video filled with three-dimensional brain illustrations and Raine’s claims that some brains are simply more biologically prone to violence than others. Rejecting what he describes as ‘the dominant model for understanding criminal behaviour in the twentieth century’ – a model based ‘almost exclusively on social and sociological’ explanations – Raine wrote that ‘the genetic basis of criminal behaviour is now well established’ through molecular and behavioural genetics.

Download Full-text

Realism and the Stock Market

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2016.70.4.473 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 70 (4) ◽

pp. 473-495

Author(s):

Henry B. Wonham

Keyword(s):

Stock Market ◽

Traditional View ◽

The Novel ◽

Wall Street ◽

Economic Developments ◽

Securities Trading

Henry B. Wonham, “Realism and the Stock Market: The Rise of Silas Lapham” (pp. 473–495) William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is usually approached as a representative text in the American realist mode and an unambiguous expression of Howells’s disdain for—in Walter Benn Michaels’s words—“the excesses of capitalism,” especially as embodied in the novel’s rendering of “the greedy and heartless stock market.” Like many commentators of the period, Howells promoted a traditional view of honest industry against the emerging phenomenon of speculative finance, and yet to read the novel as an allegory of opposition to Wall Street speculation is to oversimplify Howells’s complicated attitudes toward high finance and to make a caricature out of the novel’s treatment of complex economic developments. In this essay, I reassess Silas’s investment career and the novel’s surprisingly dense engagement with the dynamics of securities trading as a form of commerce. Critics such as Michaels and Neil Browne have contended that through Silas’s failed investment career, Howells “attempts to disarticulate…an emergent market ethos,” but as I read the novel this same “market ethos” is inseparable from Howells’s conception of realism and of the vocation of the literary realist.

Download Full-text