Keynes on the US Bankbailouts

Here are some thoughts — via Keynes — on liquidity, uncertainty, and valuation for (hopefully!) a chapter in an edited collection on Sub-Prime and the Political Economy of Global Finance.  The text is an updated version of a paper presented at the International Studies Convention in New York in February 2009.

It’s a first stab at restoring a Keynesian (or rather a Post-Keynesian) approach.  Hopefully this is the first of a number of such attempts.  This one focuses on the recent attempts by the US Treasury to restore financial health.  The argument is that by reducing the problem of uncertainty to a technical problem rather than a persistent condition of life and the economy (a la Keynes and Jacqueline Best), the bank bailouts will re-institutionalise the fetish of liquidity, reduce investment elsewhere  and continue the naive belief in market rationality.

Click here for a copy of the paper.

As always, comments are very very welcome.

‘A mile wide and an inch deep’

Please click here to download a draft copy of the paper: ‘A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep’: A review and critique of existing surveys on public opinion and development.

As usual comments are very welcome as we plan to redraft and send the paper off to a journal in April.  Comments will, of course, be duly acknowledged.

UCL Global Citizenship Lecture

UCL is really pushing a new agenda of ‘education for global citzenship’.  There are a number of webpages and more explanation of what this entails here.  My sense is that this is a worthy but difficult agenda.  Most importantly it has to have real content that goes beyond just slogans.  I look forward to seeing this happen.

Anyway, so this is the context for UCL’s new Global Citizenship Lecture series.  UCL is doing this in partnership with the Commonwealth Secretariat.  I had the extraordinary, and frankly terrifying, honour of taking part in the inaugral lecture ‘Reforming International Institutions: An Agenda for the 21st Century’.  The event was filmed and is available for viewing here.  I haven’t brought myself to watch it yet and probably won’t!

Although the time on the evening was short, the basic idea is that we should go back to John Maynard Keynes’s plans for international monetary reform as they were expressed in the 1940s.  We cannot rely on the US to reflate unilaterally.  The global nature of the crisis and the shift in the economic balance of power requires a different response.  Keynes’s work was not just limited to the need for domestic fiscal stimulus, so neither should our reading and invocation of him be.

Reflections on the Global Financial Crisis

In the middle of January I took part in a rountable on the financial crisis with the brilliant Professor Donald MacKenzie and the excellent Dr Iain Hardie.  Details of the roundtable are here.

It was the first opportunity to present some of the research I have been doing (increasingly obsessively) on what John Maynard Keynes’s work has to offer us for understanding and responding to the current financial crisis and economic downturn.  Much, I would argue.  And not just in terms of the case for fiscal stimulus.  In fact this may well be the least interesting part of the puzzle.  For me, the issues of uncertainty and international monetary reform are potentially far more important.  These themes will be revisited and hopefully improved for a talk at UCL with the to the Commonwealth Secretariat and in New York for the International Studies Convention in February.

The World Health Organization and the Social Determinants of Health

In November I had the great pleasure of attending and speaking at an event organised by the Wellcome Trust Centre to discuss the Final Report of the WHO’s Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, more information here.  The event was entitled ‘The World Health Organization and the Social Determinants of Health: Assessing Theory, Policy, and Practice’, the programme is available here. 

My paper attempted to see whether there was anything good to come of the financial crisis for funding such a large-scale and redistributive vision as the CSDH Report.  My sense is that there is.  However, the fast-changing nature of events since October 2008 means that I haven’t got around to redrafting the paper yet.  When I do I will post it here as well as here, where some of the other papers are already available.

The Report is well-worth reading.

Developing Geographies of Financialisation

This paper will appear later in 2008 as part of a special issue of Contemporary Politics.

As of 02.10.08, the published version is available here for free download.

The paper explores flows of international remittances through the lens of the financialisation literature and identifies new ‘developing geographies of financialisation’.  It argues that there are two key types of financialisation (i) an intermediated version, via the expansion of retail finance on the back of remittance flows, and (ii) a disintermediated version, via the securitisation of remittance flows.  The article also identifies the need to appropriate what were previously private and informal flows and bring them into the ‘global development architecture’.  This is done so under the premise of a crisis of development financing.

‘The Righteous Considereth the Cause of the Poor?’ – Public Attitudes Towards Poverty in Developing Countries

This is a recent paper that Jennifer van Heerde and I wrote on public attitudes to poverty. Click here to download the pdf of the October 2008 version of the paper.

The paper uses the raw data from the UK Department for International Development’s annual survey into UK public attitudes towards poverty in the developing world.  We find that individual level concern for poverty is affected by whether people see poverty as something which impacts upon them or not – those with self-interested attitudes tend to be less concerned about poverty.  This is important because (1) it suggests that material interests are not a good basis for building support for UK development policy, and (2) DFID and the OECD are looking to harness self-interested attitudes in building this support.  There is also a content analysis of 6 UK newspapers based on the questions from the survey. 

This version of the paper is the latest (October 2008) and has been revised and resubmitted to Political Studies in the light of the referees’ comments.  It is hopefully the first in a number of papers that we are preparing on this topic.  Comments are very welcome!

Hello world!

This is going to be my weblog – but for now I’m too busy to get it started, unfortunately.  Please come back some time in the future.  In the meantime I can be found at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/people/david-hudson