With the use of financial technologies to address social and environmental problems, the global finance industry now has a new proclaimed moral aim. While impact and sustainable and climate finance are promising new frontiers for the management of social and environmental public concerns, a closer scrutiny reveals a more complex picture than the industry’s surface narratives. Here, new forms of finance extraction legitimize the reproduction of old power hierarchies. We explore the historical trajectory of financial moralities, situating these within the history of capitalism. This special section explores the articulation of a growing sustainability–finance nexus across intersecting institutional, political, and cultural contexts. The contributions included document ethnographically how emergent preoccupations about concrete environmental and social outcomes generate new kinds of financial products, transactions, and financial subjectivities.
The article examines the distinctive features of Chinese financialization. It argues that in China “mass financialization” was strategically led by a state effort to compensate for the social outcomes that resulted when the communist model of collective work units (danwei) was dismantled subsequent to the opening economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping. Since the opening of the stock exchanges in Shenzhen (1990) and Shanghai (1992), a wave of “stock fever” (gupiaore) has swept the population. The article shows how the Chinese stock market offers a chance for further enrichment in the context of a shrinking welfare state and increasing individualization of society, while also functioning as a social space where individual investors can regroup in an ersatz of community belonging. Focusing on the disaggregated subjectivities left behind by the state-driven dismantling of the danwei, particularly the sanhu (literally “scattered investors”) as one of the most emblematic actors to have emerged during the whole process, the article provides an account of the current phase of Chinese mass financialization. It argues that this set of state interventions succeeded in strengthening the “myths of origin” of the contemporary Chinese regime; financialization acted as the ground upon which government slogans such as “To enrich is glorious,” “Richness is within range,” and “Dream a Chinese dream” were subsequently formulated.
By examining the 'post' financial crisis scenario in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) the paper assesses the role of Western banks in the region and how their penetration and 'resilience' is influenced by their parent and subsidiary structure. While taking stock of the variegated post-socialist transformation in CEE, it employs a genealogical method to explore how the universal bank model and its current 'bifurcation' into parent and subsidiary bank provides a lens through which to investigate a new form of dependency within the uneven geography of Europe. In the light of Rudolf Hilferding's theory of the universal bank and the theorization of financial capital, it illustrates how the present form of bank capitalization overlaps with previous forms of imperial expansion. If on one hand subsidiaries sit at the intersection between the core (home country) and the periphery (host country)-reproducing some of the old spatial hierarchy of capitalism; on the other they also enable new patterns of value extraction that go beyond these relations of dependency. Their autonomy in raising capital and in responding to local host jurisdiction in their "second home market" opens a new financial dimension of extractions that escape the oversight of national and regional regulatory regimes.
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