Sticky Power: Global Financial Networks in the World Economy

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Although modern civilization revolves around money, the nature of money is paradoxical. It is nothing more than a representation of and medium for decentralized networks of social trust, but its production is controlled by highly centralized networks of firms, places, and governments, and there is never enough of it to go around. Moreover, given that the creation of money, as credit, is based on expectations, money is at its heart an instrument for human agency to change the future. However, the financial systems that produce money are deeply rooted in the past, and perpetuate themselves through history. Sticky Power seeks to deepen our understanding of the paradox of money by introducing a novel conceptual lens, Global Financial Networks, to cast new light on the geography, history, politics, and sociology of finance from the Middle Ages to the global financial crisis and beyond. It shows that the power of finance is inherently sticky: apparently new innovations such as offshore finance actually date back centuries, and global financial networks more broadly have adapted to the rise and fall of empires and the development of new technologies while changing surprisingly little in their basic character, or at most changing very slowly. Haberly and Wójcik argue that a recognition of the mechanics of this durability calls for a new approach to reforming finance--one less reactively focused on regulation, and more proactively focused on building new institutional systems with a long-term sticky power of their own.

Daniel Haberly, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex,Dariusz Wójcik, University of Oxford

Daniel Haberly is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. His research examines the political and institutional geography of global finance, with areas of emphasis including sovereign wealth fund investment and asset management, and the architecture, regulation, and politics of the global offshore financial network. He is currently leading a UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office-funded project, in collaboration with the Tax Justice Network, that seeks to understand how historical changes in the international regulatory landscape have impacted the use of shell companies for corruption-linked and other illicit financial activities.

Dariusz Wójcik is Professor of Economic Geography at the School of Geography and the Environment, Fellow of St Peters College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor at Beijing Normal University. He published over one hundred articles and book chapters in leading journals and edited volumes, in geography, financial economics, financial history, political economy, and sustainability, and has been awarded 15 grants with a total value of over £3.6 million, funded by organisations in the UK, EU, China, and Australia. He is a member of numerous editorial boards, Global Conference on Economic Geography Committee, and chair the Global Network on Financial Geography.