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Sovereign wealth funds (SWEs) have grown rapidly in recent years both in value and in number. Despite a great deal of popular debate, very little scholarly attention has centered on the 'strategic use'of SWFs by states, that is, as tools to promote national development. Using a 'network mapping' approach, I investigate two case studies involving extensive strategic SWF investment; Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai's use of SWFs to promote the development of their aerospace sectors; and the deployment of the China Investment Corporation as an instrument of Chinese raw materials and energy policy. Strategically oriented SWF investment can be seen as a state-adaptive strategy under contemporary conditions of globalization and financialization. The viability of such a strategy, however, hinges on the manner in which it feeds into the strategies of firms and states at the receiving end of investment.

While foreign direct investment (FDI) is generally assumed to represent long‐term investments within the real economy, approximately 30–50 percent of global FDI is accounted for by networks of offshore shell companies created by corporations and individuals for tax and other purposes. To date, there has been limited systematic research on the global structure of these networks. Here we address this gap by employing principal component analysis to decompose the global bilateral FDI anomaly matrix into its primary constituent subnetworks. We find that the global offshore FDI network is highly globalized, with a centralized core of jurisdictions in Northwest Europe and the Caribbean exercising a largely homogenous worldwide influence. To the extent that the network is internally differentiated, this appears to primarily reflect a historic layering of social and political relationships. We identify four primary offshore FDI subnetworks, bearing the imprint of four key processes and events: European, particularly UK colonialism, the post–WWII hegemonic alliance between the United States and Western Europe, the fall of Soviet communism, and the rise of Chinese capitalism. We also find evidence of qualitative, but not quantitative, variation in offshore FDI based on national rule of law and communist history.

While contemporary technological disruption is increasingly conceptualized in terms of the logic and paradoxes of the digital platform economy, discussions of "FinTech" have only engaged to a limited extent with these debates-particularly from an economic geographic standpoint. Here we fill this gap by proposing an adapted Global Financial Network (GFN) framework for conceptualizing the organizational and geographic logic of the digital platform economy in finance, and applying it to examine the impact of the digital platform model on asset management. As we will show, asset management is being profoundly disrupted by what we dub digital asset management platforms-or DAMPs-which encompass services including index fund and ETF provision, roboadvising, and analytics and trading support. Like other digital platforms, DAMPs do not so much leverage technology to enhance their competitiveness within markets, as to radically restructure the market itself. Also, like other platforms, their rise has produced a winner-take-all paradox of centralization through democratization that defies predictions of technology-enabled industry decentralization. However, the logic and implications of the rise of DAMPs diverges, in other respects, from non-financial digital platforms, as finance has long possessed an informational intensity and regulatory and organizational fluidity characteristic of the digital platform economy. Consequently, the digital platform model has mostly developed endogenously in asset management through incremental innovation by major financial firms-in a process that has reinforced the position of leading incumbent asset management centers, and above all New York-rather than being introduced from the outside by upstart technology firms and clusters." [BlackRock's Aladdin] has within its memory a vast history of the past 50 years -not just financial -but all kinds of events. What it does is constantly take things that happen in the present day and compares them to events in the past. Out of the millions and millions of correlations -Aladdin then spots possible disasters -possible futures -and moves the investments to avoid that future happening. I can't over-emphasise how powerful Blackrock's system is in shaping the world -it's more powerful in some respects than traditional politics…But it's boring. And there is no story. Just patterns…It is the modern world of power -and it's incredibly boring. Nothing to film, run by a cautious man who is in no way a wolf of Wall Street. It's how power works today. It hides in plain sight -through sheer boringness and dullness." -Adam Curtis chain ledgers (Economist, 2018a;Swan, 2015).