Corporate ownership of the public debt: mapping the new aristocracy of finance

Hager, Sandy Brian

doi:10.1093/ser/mwv013

Cited by 21 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…In my own research, I have explored the class dimensions of the domestic ownership of the US public debt (Hager, 2014(Hager, , 2015(Hager, , 2016; see also Tett, 2013). Most importantly, what my research indicates is that inequality in ownership of the public debt mirrors wealth inequality more generally: when the wealth share of the top percentile of households and large corporations increases or decreases, so, too, does their share of the public debt.…”

Section: Mapping Concentrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…My own research suggests that the structural power of domestic owners of the public debt has increased markedly over the past few decades and that the consequences of this power are primarily ideological. To explore the ideological dimensions of structural power, I conducted a simple content analysis of the Economic Report of the President ( ERP ), the main document through which the US presidency details and justifies its economic policy to the public (Hager, 2015: 518–520).…”

Section: From Age To Classmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A global bond: Explaining the safe-haven status of US Treasury securities

Hager

2016

European Journal of International Relations

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This article offers new theoretical and empirical insights to explain the resilience of U.S. Treasury securities as the world's premier safe or "risk free" asset. The standard explanation of resilience emphasizes the relative safety of U.S. Treasuries due to a shortage of safe assets in the global political economy. The analysis here goes beyond the standard explanation to highlight the importance of domestic politics in reinforcing the safe status of U.S. Treasury securities. In particular, the research shows how a formidable "bond" of interests unites domestic and foreign owners of the public debt and works to sustain U.S. power in global finance. Foreigners who now own roughly half of the U.S. public debt have something to gain from their domestic counterparts. The top one percent of U.S. households that dominate domestic ownership of U.S. Treasuries has considerable political clout, thus alleviating foreign concerns about the creditworthiness of the U.S. federal government. Domestic owners, in turn, benefit from the seemingly insatiable foreign appetite for U.S. Treasury securities. In supplying the U.S. federal government and U.S. households with cheap credit, foreign investors in U.S. Treasuries help to deflect challenges to the top one percent within the wealth and income hierarchy.

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Section: Mapping Concentrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Age To Classmentioning

confidence: 99%

A global bond: Explaining the safe-haven status of US Treasury securities

Hager

2016

European Journal of International Relations

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“…Public Debt (share of GDP) is included as a proxy indicator for the power of bondholders. Since government pay interest payments to bondholders, the latter may exercise undue influence over fiscal policy to raise taxes on wage income (Streeck 2014, Hager 2015.…”

Section: Empirical Design and Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Political Economy of Inequality in Chile and Mexico: Two Tales of Neoliberalism

Gouzoulis¹,

Constantine²

2020

Preprint

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This paper undertakes a comparative study on the topographies of neoliberalism in Latin America (Chile and Mexico) and provides empirical estimates of how the varied geographies of neoliberalism affect functional income inequality between 1980-2011. Our empirical strategy employs a single-equation Unrestricted Error-Correction Model that tests an exploratory baseline specification. We find robust evidence that government consumption is a positive driver of the respective wage shares. Since Chile has entrenched austerity as opposed to Mexico, it is a fundamental explanation for its falling wage share. Private debt is the second most important explanation for why wage shares have fallen in Chile. We find no evidence of this channel in the Mexican case. The article also finds similarly varied effects of globalisation on the respective wage shares. These results demonstrate the importance of country-level studies and how new spatialities of neoliberalism through different state reconfigurations can tell unique distributional stories.

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“…Molly Scott Cato (2014) has argued that 'odious debt'a legal concept denoting sovereign debt which has been incurred in ways which do not serve the best interests of a populaceought to be repudiated. Sandy Hager meanwhile, using the US as a case study, argued that the owners of public debt constitute the new 'financial aristocracy' who enjoy the upward redistribution of capitalising upon the state's financing of its budget deficits as a profitable revenue stream (Hager 2015). In a post-growth context, public debt levels are posited above as one of the central reasons why even existing levels of state expenditure may be fiscally unsustainable, even as state borrowing is partly financed by commercial banks who create money ex nihilo (Hager 2016).…”

Section: Interrogating the Capitalist Concepts Which Constitute The Constraintsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Re-thinking the Fiscal and Monetary Political Economy of the Green State

Bailey

2018

New Political Economy

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Proponents of the Green State repudiate the historical antipathy to the state from many in the green movement and endorse the pragmatic usage of state capacity and legitimacy to realise environmental protection. This article offers a sympathetic critique of the Green State's fiscal and monetary institutional design in order to refine the concept further. It will investigate an under-theorised contradiction in the political economy of the Green State; centring upon the operationalisation of an interventionist state, moving beyond economic growth, and deference to the ceteris paribus conventions of state financing. It is argued that the three cannot co-exist harmoniously, given the ramifications of moving beyond growth for the fiscal capacity of the state. Therefore, there is a need to go further than even Eckersley does in re-politicising and challenging capitalist conventions. Specifically, Eckersley's own critical constructivist approach is invoked to interrogate the capitalist conventions that constitute the constraints surrounding state financing, such as the depoliticised production of money and the viability of debt relations.

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Corporate ownership of the public debt: mapping the new aristocracy of finance

Cited by 21 publications

References 25 publications

A global bond: Explaining the safe-haven status of US Treasury securities

A global bond: Explaining the safe-haven status of US Treasury securities

The Political Economy of Inequality in Chile and Mexico: Two Tales of Neoliberalism

Re-thinking the Fiscal and Monetary Political Economy of the Green State

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