The International Political Economy of Global Finance

Catalog description

This class gives graduate students a thorough grounding in the Architecture and Plumbing of Global finance. The Architecture is the foundations of money and the institutions and policies that manage it. This includes the production of money, Central Bank and Treasury basics, Bond Markets, Balance of Payments, Public and Private Markets and currency hierarchies. The second half of the course deals with the plumbing, which is how politics influences money in the real world. This includes issues of financial governance, financial sanctions, inflation and the offshore financial system. Although finance is now more prominent in IPE research it remains at the frontier of research topics in mainstream IPE. As such, it is an excellent area to conduct research since it remains, to steal a line from one of the field’s pioneers, Susan Strange, an ‘open range’ of inquiry.