Minsky, Critical Macro-Finance and pension funds

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Time: 2.00pm - 3.00pm
Price: free

The Political Economy Research Group (PERG) at Kingston University explores the dynamics of accumulation, distribution, and conflict in its new online summer seminars. Join us and our great line-up of speakers for our live web events!

This week we welcome Bruno Bonizzi (University of Hertfordshire).

In recent years, Critical Macro-Finance (CMF) has emerged as an interdisciplinary political economy approach to critically study modern finance. Its framework is based on a Minskyan conceptualisation of the economy as a set of connected balance sheets and cash-flows, where the payment of liabilities is the ultimate constraint on the survival of individual institutions and the reproduction of the financial system as a whole. CMF places great attention to the actual financial practices of modern financial institutions, such as the rise of collateralised transactions and derivatives, and the infrastructure of the markets in which these practices occur. Systemically, these practices have given rise to a global market-based financial system, which continuously pushes for the creation of new (liquid) asset classes. Notwithstanding some limitations (Bonizzi and Kaltenbrunner, 2020), a CMF approach can be productively used to analyse the evolution of pension funds as financial institutions across different contexts. In those countries where funded pensions are well established (such as the UK), a series of economic, regulatory and "demographic" factors, have pressurised pension funds into putting liabilities at the core of their investment practices. Through the adoption of practices such as "liability-driven investment", pension funds have started paying close attention to their ‘survival constraint' on the one hand, while simultaneously looking for sources of higher returns into newer asset classes. The latter trend is also present in emerging economies, though it manifests itself as a search for newer assets determined by the shallow and overcrowded domestic capital markets, both consequences of their economic and financial subordination.

Once registered, you will be emailed with a link to the webinar platform 2 hours prior the event, and again 10 minutes before the event begins. You do not need an account to view.

For further information about this event:

Contact: Jennifer Churchill
Email: J.Churchill@kingston.ac.uk