New Books in Finance

By: Marshall Poe
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Finance about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
    Copyright Marshall Poe
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Economics Personal Finance Science Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • Nick Bernards, "Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2024)

    Nick Bernards, "Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism" (Pluto Press, 2024)
    Nov 18 2024
    Since the global financial crisis that began in 2008, the role of the financial sector in contemporary capitalism has come under increasing scrutiny. In the global North, the expansion of the financial sector over the last 40 years has paralleled a decline in manufacturing employment and an increase in personal indebtedness, giving rise to the perception that speculation and usury have come to replace production as the engine of economic growth. In the global South, financial liberalization has exacerbated long-standing patterns of boom-and-bust cycles, and the growth of the financial sector has caused anxieties that speculative investments in natural resource extraction, urban real estate, and rural farm land are dispossessing and displacing people rather than improving human development. Overall, the growth of the financial sector has created the perception that we’re entering a new phase in capitalism’s history in which speculation and rent-seeking have displaced production as the engines of economic growth. My guest today, the political economist Nick Bernards, challenges this narrative. In his new book, Fictions of Financialization: Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First Century Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2024), Bernards argues that we need to re-center labor in narratives about the expansion of finance, that speculation and the subsumption of nature are always central to capitalism, and that major private-sector financial institutions have actually been reluctant to invest in major development projects in the global south. The main problem with the growth of finance is that it makes more exploitation, displacement, and environmental damage – in short, more capitalism – possible. Nick Bernards is Associate Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is the author of A Critical History of Poverty Finance (Pluto, 2022) and The Global Governance of Precarity (Routledge, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • Mara Kardas-Nelson, "We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)

    Mara Kardas-Nelson, "We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance" (Metropolitan Books, 2024)
    Nov 5 2024
    In this deeply researched and compelling narrative, journalist Mara Kardas-Nelson examines the complex history and impact of microfinance - the practice of giving small loans to poor people, particularly women, that was once hailed as a revolutionary solution to global poverty. Through intimate portraits of borrowers in Sierra Leone and extensive interviews with key figures in the microfinance movement, Kardas-Nelson reveals how an idea that began with noble intentions became a multi-billion dollar industry with sometimes devastating consequences for the very people it aimed to help. We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance (Metropolitan Books, 2024) weaves together two parallel narratives: the stories of women in Sierra Leone struggling with high-interest microloans while trying to support their families, and the history of how microfinance evolved from a small experiment into a global phenomenon championed by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Muhammad Yunus. Through careful reporting and historical analysis, Kardas-Nelson explores how problematic ideologies about poverty, entrepreneurship, and individual responsibility shaped the development of microfinance programs, often overlooking local economic realities and existing informal lending practices. What makes this book particularly valuable is how it challenges conventional narratives about microfinance without dismissing the real needs that drive people to seek these loans. Through detailed portraits of women in Sierra Leone, Kardas-Nelson shows how borrowers navigate a complex web of debt, social obligations, and economic pressures. The author raises important questions about whether encouraging poor people to take on high-interest debt is truly the best way to address poverty, while also examining alternative approaches like direct cash transfers and comprehensive social services. This timely investigation offers crucial insights for anyone interested in international development, poverty alleviation, and the often unintended consequences of well-meaning interventions in the lives of the world's poor. Through meticulous reporting and thoughtful analysis, Kardas-Nelson challenges readers to think more critically about how we approach poverty alleviation and what truly constitutes meaningful economic development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    46 mins
  • Justene Hill Edwards, "Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank" (Norton, 2024)

    Justene Hill Edwards, "Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank" (Norton, 2024)
    Nov 3 2024
    In Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (W. W. Norton, 2024), Justene Hill Edwards exposes how the rise and tragic failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America. In the years immediately after the Civil War, tens of thousands of former slaves deposited millions of dollars into the Freedman’s Bank. African Americans envisioned this new bank as a launching pad for economic growth and self-determination. But only nine years after it opened, their trust was betrayed and the Freedman’s Bank collapsed. Fully informed by new archival findings, historian Justene Hill Edwards unearths a major turning point in American history in this comprehensive account of the Freedman’s Bank and its depositors. She illuminates the hope with which the bank was first envisioned and demonstrates the significant setback that the sabotage of the bank caused in the fight for economic autonomy. Hill Edwards argues for a new interpretation of its tragic failure: the bank’s white financiers drove the bank into the ground, not Fredrick Douglass, its final president, or its Black depositors and cashiers. A page-turning story filled with both well-known figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Jay and Henry Cooke, and General O. O. Howard, and less well-known figures like Dr. Charles B. Purvis, John Mercer Langston, Congressman Robert Smalls, and Ellen Baptiste Lubin. Savings and Trust is necessary reading for those seeking to understand the roots of racial economic inequality in America. Justene Hill Edwards is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and the author of both Unfree Markets and a forthcoming Norton Short on the history of inequality in America. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Twitter. Website. Brian Hamilton is chair of the Department of History and Social Science at Deerfield Academy. Twitter. Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
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    42 mins

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