Hobbes’ redoubt? Toward a geography of monetary policy

Abstract

This paper undertakes three tasks: (1) to consider monetary policy’s role in contemporary capitalism and state governance; (2) to introduce the fundamentals of contemporary monetary policy; and (3) to outline some of the material and ideological stakes in the social, political, and economic geographies of monetary policy and central banking as practised in advanced capitalist nation states. I focus on subnational and class effects, arguing that the precarious relation between central banks and national democratic processes has become increasingly tenuous. Empirical examples are drawn from Canada and the USA.

After neoliberalisation? Monetary indiscipline, crisis and the state

“…Although the dynamics of monetary and fiscal policy are not frequent objects of analysis for economic geographers (although see Bennett, ; Cameron, ; Cameron, ; Mann, ), we argue that any assessment of post‐crisis capitalism must place monetary and fiscal policies, and the geographically uneven impacts of these interventions, at its centre . In this article, we examine the changing foundations of neoliberal capitalism through a critical engagement with the neoliberalisation approach (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, ; Peck & Theodore, ).…”

“…These privileged institutional sites, and their role in shaping neoliberalisation processes, have not received sufficient attention. As Mann (, pp. 601–603) suggests, in a rare geographical engagement with central banking, the dearth of monetary policy analysis is surprising.…”

Financialization and Economic Development: A Debate on the Social Efficiency of Modern Finance

“…Paul Krugman () has called this a ‘debt‐peonage society’, while J. Gabriel Palma (: 833) labelled it a ‘rentiers’ delight’ in which financialization sustains the rent‐seeking practices of oligopolistic capital — as a system of discipline as well as exploitation, which is ‘difficult to reconcile with any acceptable definition of democracy’ (Mann, : 18).…”

Is Monetary Financing Inflationary? A Case Study of the Canadian Economy, 1935-75

“…A number of studies suggest that CBI is more an effect of low inflation preferences than a cause (De Haan and Van't Hag 1995;Acemoglu et al 2008;Mann 2010); some studies emphasize the intensity of public expectations to fight inflation (Hayo 1998) or the strength of political forces demanding low inflation (Posen 1998) as causal factors. Other scholars have argued that the (low) inflation targeting regime that spread rapidly across the world in the 1990s was a result of the increased power of the financial sector to assert its (creditor) interests over those of households and industry (debtors), since an increase in inflation redistributes real income from creditors to debtors (Bowles and White 1994;Epstein 1992;Ingham 2004;Posen 1995).…”