Global Financial Crisis

Symposium Introduction: Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets: Facing the Liquidity Tsunami, Routledge, 2019

I wrote this book as an attempt to think politically about the cross-border movement of money and financial flows in developing and emerging economies, in Africa and elsewhere. Much of the economics literature, whether mainstream or more critical, and whether scholarly or policy-oriented, tends to conceive of this topic as a technical question. If only emerging markets attracted the right amount of financial capital (neither too little nor too much) with the right quality-mix (a healthy balance between long-term and short-term flows), then financial crises, speculative bubbles, overborrowing, and other negative effects could be avoided, and global finance could be harnessed for development purposes. From this perspective, then, what is at stake for emerging markets is to implement the right policies, regulations, and institutions.

The Central Bank’s Financial Stability Mandate: Sizing up Twin Peaks in South Africa

It is proposed that South Africa as a developing country needs to have a central bank that has the semblance of a developmental central bank, and that takes care of consumers, different than the orthodox, neoliberal central bank that focuses on price stability and lowering of inflation and expect market forces to protect consumers. The Twin Peaks model of financial regulation where the central bank is explicitly appointed as the guardian of financial stability, could be a small step on the way of the SARB becoming such semblance of a developmental central bank.