Rebuilding Macroeconomics from the Margins
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 10/05/2021

Rebuilding Macroeconomics from the Margins was recorded on the 24th of February 2021 with speakers Daniela Gabor, Yannis Dafermos, Jo Michell, Elisa Van Waeyenberge, Kate Bayliss, and Benjamin Bowles.

Project 1. We develop a framework that analyses institutional supercycles. These are defined as long-run processes of institutional change over which the effectiveness of institutional architectures that aim to stabilise the macrofinancial system – Minsky’s thwarting mechanisms  –  wax and wane. Using this framework, we explore the current ideational and political struggles for the emergence of a ‘green’ supercycle by comparing and contrasting the ‘Wall Street Climate Consensus’ with the ‘Green New Deal’ thwarting mechanisms.

Project 2. We present the findings of an ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project with the title, Trajectories in Infrastructure Financing in the UK, and which examines the implications of mutations in the involvement of private finance in UK infrastructure. Through an interdisciplinary approach across anthropology and political economy, we reveal a blind spot of macroeconomics in its failure to situate financialisation as core to contemporary state-economy relations and highlight the conundrum of regulating private involvement in infrastructure in the context of financialised capitalism.

This is part of a webinar series "Intensifying Inequalities and the Limitations of Global Capitalism", organised by the SOAS Department of Economics.