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Human-induced climate crisis is destroying the capacity of our planet to support our species and other life at an unprecedented rate. The most urgent of climate crisis tipping points is Arctic warming and sea ice loss. It is estimated that Arctic summer sea ice loss, that could—based on current trends—occur in one or two decades, would cause an abrupt 0.5 Watts per square meter increase in global warming above preindustrial levels that would be roughly equivalent to the effect of more than seventeen years of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions if it occurred today. A Global Green New Deal (GGND) will require at least three phases and three funding sources. The three overlapping phases are (a) short-run climate restoration or triage, (b) medium-term soil carbon sponge and water cycle adaptation or regeneration, and (c) long-run GHG drawdown or mitigation. The three funding sources are (a) utilizing the sovereign of the US government and Federal Reserve to create dollars, (b) taxing GHG emissions, and (c) taxing wealthy and high-income individuals with a particular focus on rentiers. The ex-nihilo financial support offered by the Fed to bail out the global financial system from 2008 to 2011 would have been almost sufficient to fund a 2020–2050 comprehensive GGND that includes all of the components above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accelerating financialization and rising societal wealth have meant that democratic governments increasingly provide bailouts following banking crises. Using a new long-run data set, we show that despite frequent and virulent crises before World War II, bank bailouts to protect wealth were then exceptionally rare. In recent decades, by contrast, governments have increasingly opted for extensive bailouts—well before the major interventions of 2007–2009. We argue that this policy shift is the consequence of the "great expectations" of middle-class voters overlooked in existing accounts. Associated with the growing financialization of wealth, rising leverage, and accumulating ex ante financial stabilization commitments by governments, these expectations are suggestive of substantially altered policy preferences and political cleavages. Since the 1970s, when severe banking crises returned as an important threat to middle-class wealth, this "pressure from below" has led elected governments to provide increasingly costly bailouts with no historical precedent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates that ex post bailouts prompted by a noncontractible signal of output can lead to ex ante tacit collusion. The possibility of being bailed out whenever they fail can decrease the incentives of agents to do a good job in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the Eurozone bailouts affect national democracies? Recent research indicates strong citizen detachment due to the external constraints imposed by bailout programs on national autonomy. This paper re-examines the detachment thesis by broadening the view toward multiple dimensions of democracy and effect heterogeneity across time and space. Using the generalized synthetic control method, we find a negative effect of bailouts on satisfaction with democracy and turnout but show that effects vanish after several years and vary strongly across bailout cases. In addition, we find resilient attitudes and behaviors in spite of national democratic institutions that continue to deteriorate. These findings indicate that economic policy outcomes have a stronger influence on satisfaction with democracy and electoral turnout than the quality of the democratic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages the analyses of Poulantzas, Anderson, and Ferreira do Aramal to outline the main politico-economic contours of post-Carnation Revolution Portugal. The account that follows examines the effects of accession to the European Economic Community (EEC), European Union (EU) structural funding and liberalization policies, and the euro currency. The article concludes by situating the troika's 2011 "rescue" of the Portuguese state—and the accompanying austerity measures—within the post-1974 process of "Europeanization." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the framing of the bailout-related news in Cyprus, adopting a critical analytical perspective. The examination of the actors' associations with the main framing components (actors, causes, solutions and effects), as presented in the Cypriot elite press, revealed the dependency, the (non)liability and the economistic frame. These frames reproduce the hegemonic neoliberal discourse over the crisis, while disconnecting the responsibility for the crisis from the agents involved, protecting, thus, the legitimacy of their actions and of their authority. The media studied advocate the implementation of neoliberal policies (expressed in harsh austerity and protection of the banking system), legitimating them as the optimal model not only of the economy, but also of politics and social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Greece’s economic crisis is a by-product of a deeper institutional, political and societal crisis. The crisis brought about a bailout programme conditional on fiscal and structural reform, as set forth in three successive memoranda of understanding between Greece and its creditors. The domestic political class accepted these memoranda, albeit reluctantly. After the initial response with its populist overtones and the subsequent long and tortuous process of adjustment, the country now seems close to a consensus on a minimum reform agenda. However, Greece needs a change of paradigm: a shift away from deep-rooted attitudes that have impaired the country’s tremendous potential, to a culture of reform and growth. Its political leadership has to come up with a plan, one embraced by the people, that will push the country out of the current catastrophic interlude and lead it into a new virtuous cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four essays on the regulation, reform, and reformulations needed to rebuild and fortify the U.S. economy, on scales personal and national. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent debates about inequality, many have pointed to the predominant position of the finance. This article highlights that structural power, not lobbying resources, are key to explaining variations across countries. It examines finance-government negotiations over national bank rescue schemes during the recent financial crisis. Given the structural power of finance, the variation in bank bailouts across countries cannot be explained by lobbying differences. Instead of observing organized interest intermediation, we can see that disorganization was crucial for the financial industry to get off the hook and let the government carry the burden of stabilizing the economy. Put differently, structural power is strongest when finance remains collectively inactive. In contrast to traditional accounts of the lobbying influence of finance, the comparison highlights that the lack of organization can have crucial redistributive consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portugal is working on the reform of its local government. Although amalgamation was one of the recommended strategies, as a consequence of the European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout process, an alternative approach has been suggested. This reform is mostly a development of inter-municipal cooperation mechanisms combined with partial devolution strategies. However, as the bailout agreement was its main catalyst, the urgency to cut public administration costs required in the memorandum and the imposed deadlines gave a perverse incentive for central government to produce ad hoc and fragmented modifications. I argue that these political and economical demands, which sanctioned the argument for rushed measures, together with the country’s strong local identities, historical municipalism, political centralism and the political costs of significant territorial changes, can explain the absence of a comprehensible reform strategy and the singularities of its policies. This article explores the framework that justifies the reform and assesses the impacts of the bailout agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As soon as the sovereign debt crisis began, it was widely understood that Germany’s response would dictate its ultimate resolution. Whereas the initial round of bailouts stabilized markets and preserved the Euro, the purpose of the second Greek bailout is less clear. We argue that the German government’s decision to support a second Greek bailout reflected domestic political calculations. While a bailout would involve short-term political costs, Merkel’s government also recognized the social and economic consequences of potential Greek default. In particular, a default entailed the prospect of a massive inflow of migrants from Southern Europe into Germany, which would have hurt labor markets and, in turn, could have cost Merkel’s coalition electoral support. To evaluate the political, economic, and social costs of the second Greek bailout, we use models of credit default swap spreads, studies of international migration, and research on vote intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on Ireland's financial recovery after the 2008 global economic crisis and its impact on the country's alcohol and drug issues. Topics include Ireland's acceptance of a financial bailout from the Troika, the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, Ireland's economic recovery as of the end of 2015, and issues and legislation like the National Alcohol Policy, the Public Health (Alcohol) Bill, and Misuse of Drugs Act.

The article presents an update on the economic fallout in Greece and the following unrest among citizens. The government's and the labor movement's problems started in February 2012 after the signing of the second bailout agreement. However, the forces at play in Greece are at least as much about regionalization as globalization.

With the recent development of the Occupy Movement, public criticism of neoliberalism has climaxed since the onset of a global financial crisis in late 2008. The mobilization of protesters in cities throughout the world was preceded by much speculation in the media and blogosphere over the past few years, where commentators have been quick to suggest that the end of neoliberalism is upon us. The validity of postneoliberalism, however, remains tenuous, as its advocates continue to treat neoliberalism as a monolithic, static, and undifferentiated end-state. Despite the desire to move beyond neoliberal strictures, there is an undeniable continuity to neoliberalism that must be appreciated if we ever hope to leave this unforgiving version of capitalism truly in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather weak stringency. Obstacles to testing this hypothesis include finding a measure of political importance that is not plagued by endogeneity and obtaining data on IMF conditionality. We propose to measure political importance using temporary membership on the UN Security Council and analyze a newly available data set on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the 1992–2008 period. We find a negative relationship: Security Council members receive about 30 percent fewer conditions. This suggests that the major shareholders of the IMF trade softer conditionality in return for political influence over the Security Council. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2008 bailout is often taken as evidence of the domination of the US political system by large financial institutions. In fact, the bailout demonstrated the vulnerability of US banks to government pressure. Large banks in the United States could not defy regulators, because their future income depended on the US market. In Britain, by contrast, one bank succeeded in scuttling the preferred governmental solution of an industry-wide recapitalization, because most of its revenue came from outside the United Kingdom. This was an exercise of structural power, but one that most contemporary scholarship on business power ignores or misclassifies, since it limits structural power to the automatic adjustment of policy to the possibility of disinvestment. We show that structural power can be exercised strategically, that it is distinct from instrumental power based on lobbying, and that it explains consequential variations in bailout design in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the relationship between governments and the banking industry. Particular focus is given to government bailouts of banks and government insurance of deposits and mortgages. The author suggests that banks should pay government agencies for the services they provide to the banking industry and that governments should reduce their involvement in the industry. Other topics include innovation, free markets, and government regulation.

Was the Tea Party a spontaneous uprising of US citizens against the economic bailout? Was it a protest against President Obama? Has the Tea Party replaced the Christian Right as the powerhouse of the Republican Party? Angelia Wilson investigates. Was the Tea Party a spontaneous uprising of US citizens against the economic bailout? Was it a protest against President Obama? Has the Tea Party replaced the Christian Right as the powerhouse of the Republican Party? Angelia Wilson investigates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews issues in white-collar crime research related to both the causes and aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown. The absence of major prosecutions, new legislation designed to prevent similar debacles, and post-meltdown case studies are discussed to illuminate the culture and business practices of major companies that were responsible for the unprecedented losses to the financial system and the resulting taxpayer bailout. We conclude that despite new legislation, regulatory gaps and continued lack of adequate oversight as a result of intense lobbying by the financial industry, as well as a non-understanding of the role of fraud in major financial debacles by policy makers, virtually guarantee that future financial crises will occur due to fraud, even in the most elite firms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how two print media outlets, one liberal and one conservative, contextualize the 2008 bank bailout. It argues that political media can be seen as examples of Appadurai's localities, promoting individual identity through the creation of narratives of the Other, in keeping with Said's study of Orientalism. By comparing the localizing techniques used in response to the unique political situation of the bailout vote, it is possible to determine the extent to which liberal and conservative localities share identity-producing techniques, and also the extent to which each ideological locality maintains an identity distinct from the partisan localities of the two major U.S. political parties. The results indicate that in this instance both localities share localizing techniques, but differ in their relation to their associated political parties, with the conservative locality subsumed into the Republican Party, but the liberal locality clearly distinct from the Democratic Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the institutions of the Chinese semi-planned administration under which the grassroots role of debtors has loomed large and made possible the transition of grassroots cadres from predators to debtors. The institutional features of the semi-panned administration—the institution of target responsibility, the legacy of cost shifting, and the paternalistic care provided by the socialist state—together with related policy measures explain the pathology of budget deficits and debt problems at the grassroots level across rural China. An investigation into the public finances of grassroots governments in Wenzhou, Wuxi, and Jianshi illuminates how the Chinese semi-planned administration has shaped individual cadres’ calculations and behavior, perpetuated their irresponsible spending, and reproduced local soft budget constraints. This article argues that without an outright revamping of the institutions of the Chinese semi-planned administration, the current practice of simply writing off rural debt through financial bailouts perpetuates soft budget constraints across the countryside. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are numerous accounts of the financial crisis that shocked the Western world in 2008. Almost all the commentaries are steeped in the same cognitive paradigm of linear thinking and assumptions of economic self-interest that could be seen to have created the crisis. While acknowledging the multiplicity of reasons for the crisis and how it should be managed, this article offers an alternative in presenting a gendered perspective that could complement but also challenge some of the conventional wisdom. It suggests a link between managing masculinity and mismanaging the corporation leading to government bailouts for the banks and a near collapse of Western economies. Although new governance and regulation are clearly important responses to the crisis, they do not necessarily get to the root of the problem. A more sociological form of analysis could help us to understand how individual material and symbolic self-interest deriving partly from misrecognition of the self as autonomous but reinforced by masculine fragilities was a major condition of the excesses leading to the crisis. This article explores how this self-interest is not just a reflection of the neo-liberal economic consensus but also of masculine discourses within the business class elite that make the pursuit of ever spiralling remuneration almost obligatory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Republic of Ireland was the first country in the eurozone to adopt a neoliberal infused ‘austerity budget’, and the ill-judged state bailing out of a number of reckless banks and associated financial institutions is costing billions of euros. In late 2010, as the crisis deepened, the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank provided a ‘bailout’ package that resulted in further punitive public spending cuts and the eradication of national sovereignty. This paper maintains that the present crisis is more than a mere economic crisis, but can be viewed as a series of interlinked ‘conjunctures’. Tracing the connection between the historical and the contemporary, the first part of the discussion will explore six thematic components relating to the structuring of the Irish state. These are identified as: a ‘class rule state’; an ‘authoritarian state’; a ‘confining state’; a ‘censoring state’; a ‘discriminatory state’; and a ‘state within the state’. These six dimensions provide a contextual underpinning for the second part of the paper, which focuses on the crisis in child welfare and child protection services and dwells on the shambolic performance of the Health Service Executive (HSE), deficits in the ‘care’ system and the HSE failure to furnish reliable data on the deaths of children in contact with social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis (GFC) has negatively impacted on banks, financial institutions and companies such as General Motors (GM), bringing the latter’s European subsidiary close to insolvency and highlighting some of the US car manufacturer’s long-term problems, which were solved through a partial takeover by the US government. In Germany, GM’s strongest presence in Europe, the company had a close encounter with bankruptcy in the spring of 2009, narrowly averted when the sale of GM’s Opel subsidiary (GMO) was actively sought. This paper is about the conflict between one company’s management and one works council, in one location. The empirical field research focuses exclusively on the position of GMO’s works council, reporting its views and perspectives on GMO’s management and the GFC. On this basis, two arguments are presented: first, that the relevance of GMO’s works council was reflective of a version of capitalism that has been associated with the model of a ‘coordinated market economy’ (CME) rather than an Anglo-Saxon model of a ‘liberal market economy’ (LME); and second, that despite the eventual cancellation of the sale of GMO by GM-USA (2010), the case highlights how key labour actors coordinated their activities in order to prevent GMO’s bankruptcy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In response to the financial crisis of 2007–2010, governments in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have invested billions of dollars in financial institutions to prevent them from going bankrupt and from further disrupting the global economy. Despite these massive public bail-outs, a government and “elite” consensus has emerged that these nationalized or quasinationalized financial institutions should be privatized as soon as possible, and that, apart from modest changes in financial regulation, our economies should return to the status quo ante financial structure. I disagree. As the crisis reveals, “financier” dominated finance has a number of devastating flaws: it creates major externalities that contribute to financial and real economic instability; it promotes short-term investment strategies; it contributes to inequality; and it undermines economic efficiency and the achievement of social goals in the real economy. I argue that a better strategy for achieving economic recovery, restructuring, and widely shared, sustainable prosperity is to use public investments in the financial sector to build on the successful post-World War II experiences of publicly oriented financial institutions to create a stronger presence of “finance without financiers.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although labor studies research has commonly looked to sociology, history, and economics for new perspectives, behavioral psychology has largely been underutilized. This article provides a popular psychological model of behavior and examples of its application in issues of interest to labor, specifically the Employee Free Choice Act and the auto industry "rescue." It is the authors' belief that considering such models will provide a different viewpoint through which to analyze labor issues and promote further integration of psychology and labor studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bank bail-outs enacted by the Brown government in the wake of the 2007 credit crunch have had a distinctive political character. Despite the government's pronouncements on the merits of swift and decisive interventions, I argue that this does not amount to a return to the interventionist regulatory form associated with post-war British welfare capitalism. The Polanyian distinction between ‘habitation’ and ‘improvement’ is used to show that the bail-outs were designed by contrast to defend the underlying deregulatory logic of the existing financial regime. The only real change of note was to uncover forcibly the often hidden influence of the state in the making and regulation of an ostensibly market-led neoliberalism and the creation instead of a much more overt state-led neoliberalism. Habitation strategies were incorporated into a structure of financial deregulation, making it more rather than less difficult to rejuvenate state capacities consistent with enhancing societal welfare. The bank bail-outs offered short-term salvation for distressed firms within the financial sector without providing the state with socialised control over the conduct of banking business in order to promote forms of social policy consistent with post-war British welfare capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pay-for-performance plans have become prevalent in organizations, with individual incentives becoming a larger portion of executive and employee pay. More recently, however, the use of incentives has come under fire as some in the financial sector, for instance, continued to reap the rewards of previously negotiated packages even as their organizations were accepting government bailouts. Although there is extensive literature on the advantages and disadvantages of pay-for-performance systems, new research in the area of neuroeconomics adds more complexity to the debate. This research has revealed that an employee's physiological reactions to money may be as powerful as those to sex or drugs, suggesting that those designing incentive programs may need to be far more cautious than even previously thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bailout Bill is Congress's most recent attempt at legislating executive pay. A look at the consequences of historical legislation shows that legislation often has the opposite effect than what was intended, and actually has increased executive compensation in certain cases instead of curbing it. This article discusses the long-term implications of the bailout bill provisions and how the current market atmosphere may change basic strategies in executive compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to research on the regulation of technological risks in the form of a case study of the Baltic Sea ferry traffic. The analysis suggests that the social systemic features of an industry heavily influence the relation- ship between technological failures and risk regulation. The study augments recent work on how regulations affect the handling of technological risks and how failures influence regulatory arrangements. These issues have already been studied in the context of aviation, auto, chemical, nuclear power, and railway industries, but not in shipping. As an extension to previous literature, the authors also explore how different regulatory organizations in this industry act in relation to risks and how they influence each other in risk regulation activities. The study highlights the indirect relationships between technological failures and risk regulation arrangements. It also underlines the influence of the involved actors on the regulatory responses to technological failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published within the issue including one on the founding of the Association for Humanist Sociology (AHS) and another about the bailout of AIG and Lehman Brothers.