Toward a Criminological Understanding of Financialization

This article weaves together the ascendancy of financial markets and the field of critical criminology. It argues that critical perspectives such as crimes of the powerful and crimes of globalization may benefit from analyzing financialization as a key economic and cultural transformation in today’s capitalism. The analysis of financialization is made through the literature that addresses the economic transformations of capitalist accumulation, thus framing finance capital in the post-Fordist regime of production. By using this perspective, this article develops the argument that the cyclical speculative waves of finance are not a congenital pathology of capitalism but its very mode of governmentality. Overall, this article claims the analytic potential of financialization studies to deepen our understanding of the social and environmental harms produced by powerful corporations and financial institutions.

Reparative accumulation? Financial risk and investment across socio-environmental crises

With the growing global recognition that environmental and social crises are pushing systems of social and ecological reproduction to their breaking points, governments, philanthropists, and the private sector are proposing a variety of strategies that aim to shift the social and environmental role of finance capital from an extractive process to a reparative one. A frequent refrain is that only finance capital promises the scale of investment necessary to address Earth’s complex social and environmental problems, and that trillions of private investment dollars wait in the wings ready to mobilize for the right kinds of projects. A hallmark of these approaches is their promise of “triple bottom line” outcomes, with social, environmental, and financial benefits—what the industry refers to as “responsible investing.” This symposium interrogates the political dynamics and financial mechanisms underlying ongoing experiments in so-called responsible finance, including various forms of impact investing and financial “solutionism” to social and environmental problems. We develop the term “reparative accumulation” to conceptualize the divergent forms and continuities in how these new financial devices function across sectors, what types of futures the industry is attempting to create, the effects on socionatures, and what resistance might look like both within and outside these systems.

Determinan Profitablitas: Risiko Pembiayaan, Capital Adequacy Ratio Dan Operational Efficiency Ratio (Studi Empiris Pada Bank Perkreditan Rakyat Syariah di Provinsi Banten Yang Terdaftar di OJK Periode Januari 2017 – September 2019)

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui pengaruh risiko pembiayaan, capital adequacy ratio dan operational efficiency ratio terhadap profitabilitas. Metode yang digunakan pada penelitian ini adalah metode kuantitatif. Desain penelitian ini adalah asosiatif jenis kausal (hubungan sebab akibat). Populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah Bank Perkreditan Rakyat Syariah di Provinsi Banten yang terdaftar di OJK pada periode Januari 2017 – September 2019. Teknik pengambilan sampel pada penelitian ini menggunakan teknik sampel jenuh yang menghasilkan 88 sampel penelitian. Data yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah data sekunder berupa laporan keuangan triwulan. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah studi pustaka dimana peneliti menghimpun informasi relevan yang berkaitan dengan topik atau masalah yang akan atau sedang diteliti. Analisis data yang digunakan pada peneilitian ini melalui Uji Statistik Deskriptif, Uji Asumsi Klasik, Regresi Berganda, Uji t tabel, Uji F tabel dan Uji Koefisien Determinasi yang diolah melalui SPSS Versi 25. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian dapat disimpulkan bahwa: 1) tidak terdapat pengaruh Non Performing Finance terhadap Return On Assets, 2) terdapat pengaruh yang signifikan Capital Adequacy Ratio terhadap Return On Assets, 3) terdapat pengaruh yang signifikan Operational Efficiency Ratio terhadap Return On Assets, dan 4) terdapat pengaruh yang signifikan Non Performing Finance, Capital Adequacy Ratio, dan Operational Efficiency Ratio terhadap Return On Assets

Speculative urbanism and the urban-financial conjuncture: Interrogating the afterlives of the financial crisis

This article proposes an analytical–methodological approach to understand this historical conjuncture of speculative urbanism in which global finance capital plays an increasingly important role in urban transformation. Whereas the scholarship on urban financialization makes sharp distinctions between what occurs in the global North and the South, portraying the process in the South as one of subordination or peripheralization and in the North as mature and stable (although volatile), this article seeks to demonstrate that the North–South divide is less effective as an explanatory power. Instead, it presents an analytical approach that is attuned to the relentless dynamism and inter-scalar hyper-mobility of finance capital working across the postcolonial map—in other words, a relational–conjunctural approach. The article suggests the method of “following the financial strategy” by analyzing urban forms and projects as processes constituted by the nexus of practices in finance and city planning. It looks closely at finance’s use of inter-scalar financial tools (such as arbitrage, interest rate swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and currency hedges) across borders, sectors, infrastructures, and conditions, as mediated by national and international state actors. The value of this analytical–methodological approach will be illustrated through notable financial transactions occurring in and across cities to emphasize their speculative and financial characteristics—specifically highlighting investments traversing cities of Spain, the USA, and India. The focus here is on financial strategies emerging from the detritus of the 2008 global financial crisis and shaped by the expanding discursive-material formation of speculative urbanism.

Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism

Neoimperialism, the specific contemporary phase of historical development, can be summed up on the basis of five key features: the new monopoly of production and circulation; the new monopoly of finance capital; the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property; the new monopoly of the international oligarchic alliance; and the economic essence and general trend.

The New Finance Capital: Corporate Governance, Financial Power, and the State

We argue that a new form of finance capital has been consolidated in the United States since the 2008 crisis—defined as a fusion of financial and industrial capital. In this regime, financiers have become more entrenched in the governance of nonfinancial corporations while, reciprocally, industrial firm managers have increasingly become financiers. Indeed, this fusion has taken place on two interconnected levels: (1) within the nonfinancial corporation itself, and (2) between the nonfinancial corporation and the financial sector. Internal diversification and internationalization over the postwar era led to the reorganization of the industrial corporation as a financial group, managing not concrete production processes, but portfolios of financial assets. This was reinforced by the increasing power of outside investors over the neoliberal period. However, new forms of financial organization that emerged after 2008 produced tighter and more direct linkages between external financiers and the nonfinancial corporation, constituting the new finance capital.