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This article explores the wide-ranging influence of the yield curve -a diagrammatic device for representing the term structure of effective interest rates on market-traded debt instruments -in contemporary monetary, financial and economic life. Drawing on the expanding literature on financial performativity, including within the field of cultural economy, the article submits that by virtue of its centrality to multiple, closely interconnected and often highly recursive sets of relations between economies, financial markets and central banks, the yield curve is performative at a range of different levels; and, parsing various different extant understandings of performativity, the article theorizes the particular nature of such performativity in the yield curve context. Against the grain of the bulk of the literature on financial performativity, however, the article also endeavors to connect the yield curve's performativity explicitly to questions of privilege (the privileges of representation) and power (the power to perform) and their unequal distribution. That is to say, the article argues that to understand the multidimensional performativity of the yield curve, we need to draw out its political as well as cultural economy.

There exists an influential and growing political-economic literature on the treatment of land-urban and rural-as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.

This article examines recent plans for US municipalities to use the state legal power of eminent domain to forcibly acquire underwater mortgages (i.e. those with negative equity), and to refinance them on terms more favorable to the homeowners in question, as a way of addressing in a socially progressive way the nation's ongoing foreclosure crisis. The article makes three main arguments. The first is that insofar as the plan threatens to disrupt prevailing norms of value distribution and risk bearing, it represents a fundamental challenge to the existing political economy of urban financial capitalism in the US and the law's mediation thereof. The second is that value, risk, and their mediation through law must be understood in the context of geographical unevenness and shifting scales of legal governance. The third is that the geographical political economy associated with the eminent domain plan is about discoursesof risk, of markets, and indeed of law per seno less than materialities; and that the two are indelibly linked, with discourses having material effects when, through law, they structure value and risk for the manifold actors who operate within the sphere of housing finance.

We are now not far short of a decade on from the start of the global financial crisis. By most reckonings, those regions most directly affected by the crisis, and most people living therein, are still struggling to recover from and to come to terms with that crisis. But there already exists a burgeoning literature on the next great financial crisis: on, that is to say, what has - or, more pointedly, has not - been done to prevent such a reoccurrence, to limit its likelihood, or to restrict its potential scope. This literature, and in particular its discussion of financial (re) regulation, is the subject of this article. Through a critical reading of the literature the article argues that positive (re) regulation has been inhibited by the power of the financial sector to stymie meaningful reform, and that this power assumes highly material geographical configurations. The article also emphasizes the profound influence of economic ideas on financial policy-making. One idea that perhaps needs thorough critical reconsideration, the article concludes, is that of financial regulation itself.

Mann's article makes a large number of brave and substantial claims about Keynes and Keynesian reason' in the context of contemporary capitalism and Left politics. But this depth and breadth makes the article problematic as well as significant, for the simple reason that Mann is unable to fully substantiate all of the claims in question. This commentary critically considers one such claim, concerning the relation between Keynes, Keynesianism, and neoliberalism.

Several US counties and local governments have recently considered a novel solution to the foreclosure crisis. They plan to use eminent domain to compel the owners of mortgage debt-and specifically of private-label mortgage-backed securities-to sell the debt to the government at a price reflecting the loan's market value. The government would then restructure the debt and resell it to new investors. The plans are striking because-in contrast to both development-driven eminent domain and the federal subprime bank bailout-they would force investors to assume asset devaluation and increased long-term risk. Notably, the plans have emerged as an instance of financialization-focused politics in suburbs and suburban cities of color, specifically majority-black and - Latino/a suburbs. Local support for the plans, we argue, is rooted in the long-term disinvestment of these 'suburbs of exception', which became targets of subprime lending and eventually sites where the 'financial exception' has been localized. But these demographic shifts, fragmentation and fiscal pressures have at the same time created a suburban political terrain in which the plans have gained their strongest political support.

I tretton kapitel utmanas rådande problemformuleringar om vad som utgör hindren för att skapa en mer tillgänglig bostadsmarknad och rimligare boendesituation åt alla. Är ökad marknadsekonomi lösningen på bostadsbristen? Måste vi sänka kvalitetskraven för att alla ska få tak över huvudet? Hur hänger bostadsfrågan och frågan om integration och segregation ihop? Är gentrifiering en naturlig förändring av staden? Rådande "sanningar" om fler avregleringar, lägre skatter och ökad marknadsfrihet har kommit att stå i vägen för nytänkande. Det behövs fler röster i debatten. 13 myter om bostadsfrågan ger alternativa tolkningar som kan föra in nya perspektiv på bostadskrisen. Boken ges ut av Förlag Dokument Press, med illustrationer av Sara Granér.

Recent research has suggested that one of the key ways in which economics and cognate calculative discourses and practices ‘perform’ the economy is through the drawing of conceptual boundaries between economic activities and entities of various sorts. One such boundary is the boundary between markets. This article shows that a critical contemporary arena for the differentiation of one product or service market from another is competition (or antitrust) law, which, through its work of market definition, seeks to identify the boundaries of competition: the location of the borders between meaningful economic spaces within which buyers and sellers encounter one another and establish prices. The article argues that in envisioning markets (‘the law's markets’), competition law simultaneously constitutes markets, and it demonstrates this through an empirical examination of the exercise of such law in three economic sectors: insurance, grocery retailing, and pay-television. It also shows, however, that competition law is perennially dogged by conflict – both over the placement of such conceptual boundaries, and over the very process of placement and the status of the market boundary itself – and that its application and effects can only be understood in this light.

The global financial and more widely economic crisis which began in 2007–2008 has been a crisis indelibly of political economy. This fact has led scholars of finance ‘back’ to political economy, where geographers’ interest in finance first materialized in the 1980s. In this light, this article reviews recent work on the geographical political economy of the crisis, highlighting such work’s main themes, contributions and lacunae. It shows that this work has been powerfully influenced by developments in geographical political economy, and by the latter’s engagement with alternative intellectual traditions, over the past three decades. But it argues also that the attempt to theorize and document the place of finance within geographical political economy remains very much an ongoing project.

Amongst a series of scandals to hit international financial markets in recent years, that surrounding the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) - a highly influential interest rate benchmark - has attracted particularly intense media scrutiny. This paper seeks to push beyond conventional understandings to unpack critically both LIBOR itself and the scandal involving its manipulation by major international banks. Envisioning LIBOR as a commodity beset by inherent contradictions, the paper mobilizes the tropes of arbitration, arbitrage and arbitrariness to illuminate, respectively: the market-making work performed by LIBOR; its role in enabling the transfer of financial risk, most notably when fraudulently manipulated; and the nature of the regulatory prosecution of such manipulation.

The difference between bank-based and market-based financial systems is a longstanding and influential conceptual staple of the interdisciplinary literature on finance. This dualistic model has been subjected to wide-ranging critiques over the past decade. Yet, while those critiques productively problematize the relationship between banks and markets presumed by the model, they fail to address the underlying distinction between banks and markets that is also presumed by the model. This article questions that distinction. It argues that financial markets are best understood not as places or platforms where banks and other financial actors come to interact - and thus as essentially separate from banks - but, instead, as, in large part, their interaction; as constituted by it. The article further argues for the political as well as scholarly importance of reconfiguring our ideas of what financial markets are. The idea of markets as separate, reified phenomena not only underpins the scholarly model of bank- and market-based financial systems - it does political work in the wider world, with the appeal to financial markets or, more nebulously, "the market" to rationalize and justify political decision-making having become a commonplace of contemporary public policy discourse. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In this response to the commentaries, I extend my critique in a new direction, arguing that work on financialization has had the perverse effect of black boxing ‘finance’ and crucial dimensions thereof. In developing this argument, I draw explicitly on, while seeking to generalize from, incisive observations contained in the commentaries. In doing so, I argue that it is important to address limits to financialization—political limits—not identified and addressed in the original article.

Over the past decade, the concept of financialization has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of scholarly inquiry across several social–scientific disciplines, human geography among them. The subject of a burgeoning, variegated literature advancing both theoretical delineation and empirical substantiation, processes of financialization, on many accounts, belong alongside those of globalization and neoliberalization as the defining dynamics of late modern capitalism. In the spirit of fostering a constructive dialogue, this article develops a broadly based critique of such accounts, one structured around the core idea of limits. Financialization, it suggests, is substantively limited, both as a concept and as the array of real-world processes to which that concept variously pertains. The article identifies and fleshes out five key sets of such limits and the connections between them: analytic, theoretic, strategic, optic, and empiric limits. If the concept of financialization is to do substantially positive descriptive and explanatory work going forward, the article submits, these limits must be explicitly recognized and their implications explicitly factored in. This, the article concludes, is no small challenge.