Central banking, Finance and Power with Benjamin Braun
Channel: Crash Course
Date: 2020-06-23

Benjamin Braun speaks with Sara Murawski and Rodrigo Fernandez about central banking, finance and power, in this second webinar of Crash Course series on monetary policy, central banks and ideology.

0:00 Sara Murawski Introduction of Crash Course
2:04 Rodrigo Fernandez on series “Monetary policy, central banks and ideology”
3:15 Sara explains the set up of the seminar
04:17 Rodrigo introduces Benjamin Braun
06:03 Benjamin Braun starts his presentation 
09:29 Administrative versus market-based state agency 
12:33 Infrastructural Entanglement and Power
15:32 Three types of financial-sector power 
17:19 The political economy of infrastructural power
18:57 Historical examples of infrastructural power
23:05 Graphics of large scale asset purchases (2010-2020) by Fed, BoJ and ECB
28:34 Q&A: How does infrastructural power relate to the non-financial corporate world? 
35:40 Q&A: What are backstops? 
36:50 Q&A: Democratic control of central banks?
43:08 Q&A: Monetary financing prohibition
46:04 Q&A: Progressive to monetary financing?
48:24 Q&A: Targeting of asset prices 
52:37 Q&A:  Implications of Katherina Pistor’s Legal Theory of Finance
54:59 Q&A: EC Green deal agenda and taxonomy
57:05 Q&A: Legislative changes to limit infrastructural entanglement
59:40 Q&A: Democratic transparency and accountability of central banks? 

What does the post-2007 web of interdependencies between monetary authorities, systemic banks and other leading financial actors look like? Why is this important to understand the prospects for change?

Responses by central banks, particularly the Fed, after the Covid-19 crash were decisive and strong – and prevented a meltdown. What are the likely distributional effects of this rescue operation in the longer term? Where are the politics in all of this?

How does ideology play a role in the ability to imagine a different monetary system?

Benjamin Braun (PhD) is a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2019–2020). His research focuses on the comparative and international political economy of financial and monetary systems and has been published, among others, in Economy and Society, Review of International Political Economy, and Socio-Economic Review. He tweets at @BJMbraun. 

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