February 2012
36 posts
Global Financial Crisis
Geographies of the financial crisis is an article which examines the credit crisis that not only affects the underprivileged minority population in the housing market, but also causes a trickling effect that falls into numerous other agencies. Aalbers stated that it all started in 2007 where foreclosure rates increased and housing value decreased; causing new innovations to trick the lower-class...
The Riches of the Poor
Within this week’s readings, poverty seemed to play an immense role. Although not a very recent article, I recalled reading something interesting by Michael Zweig. In the article, Whats Class Got to do With it, Michael Zweig suggests, “Poverty is the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.” Many would agree that this is an accurate depiction...
Humans as Objects and Regions
One central theme that connects the articles is the exponentially increasing urban population; slums are created, and elite groups target them and take advantage of them. For this post, I am choosing to focus on “The Riches of the Poor” article regarding Haitian slaves. The Cite Soleil slum is “the poorest and most densely populated six square miles in the poorest and most...
Understanding the Current Working Framework
Katherine Boo’s “Letters from India: The Best Job in Town” is about a man named Harish Kumar, and American document processing company, and the overall trend of outsourcing jobs into the third world countries. She specifically mentions of the Western culture and more “refined” training and techniques Kumar uses to teach employees of Office Tiger. What is interesting is that these 3rd world...
Indoctrination, and Globalization: Tools for the...
After Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and began to spread their foothold in the world beyond their shores, explorers and those looking to capitalize on the resources that existed in the New World traveled to foreign, unfamiliar lands, and attempted to impose their culture on civilizations with vastly different morals, ethics, and societal make-ups. These men were sometimes associated with the...
Microfinancing and the Pollution of Free Money
In The Pollution of Free Money: Debt, Discipline, and Dependance on the Middle East, Ananya Roy talks about micro-financing in the Middle East, specifically in Afghanistan and Egypt. Roy describes how micro-financing works, and discusses how poor women are able to rise to independence by starting their own businesses. This liberation of women is a key argument for micro-financing in the Middle...
Lagos & The Planet of Slums
Today, the worldwide urban population likely equals or even outnumbers the rural population. As Davis (2004) argues, human civilization has landed on new and absolutely unprecedented grounds. It is also a scenario we are in many ways unprepared for. Uncharted waters. Even Malthusian pundits did not predict the urban population boom of the last half-century, and the crucial role that the Global...
The Implications of Microfinance
Microfinance is the process of making small loans to individuals so they can invest it in a business, thus bringing them out of poverty. Once that person is out of poverty, they can pay the lenderback. The Pollution of Free Money questions the theory that bringing microfinance to the Middle East, thus bringing young poor Muslim men out of poverty, would deter them from terrorism. The author views...
Global Peripheries
The idea of the world system theory dividing up the world’s nations into center, semi periphery and periphery has been around since the 1970’s, but has been in action for much longer. “In the center, economies are dynamic and growth in them is stimulated by factors internal to their economies. In the periphery, growth may occur, but the sources of this growth are external in nature and, in fact,...
Financial Woes
Our recent financial history teaches us nothing if not to be too greedy. What was wrong with the old way of banking? For us simple folk who wanted to borrow money to buy a house or simply to open a checking account…there was nothing wrong. However for the investment bankers there was apparently too much banking and not enough investing. In chapter one of Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean’s...
Economic Development and Effectiveness of Foreign...
This week’s readings addressed development and its connection to the large scale spatial effects of globalization. The readings focused on how the poor, in Egypt and Haiti, for example, become directly affected by economic issues that may not directly relate to their country. (For example, an American can buy a restavek in Haiti. The restavek has no concept of America, and the American government...
Over-urbanization: a developing phenomena
In Michael Davis’ article, Planet of Slums, he elaborates on the increasing world population that is occurring primarily in urban areas. He brings up the term over-urbanization to describe the growing problem in developing countries. This problem entails the continued population growth and migration to cities regardless of the falling real wages and growth of unemployment. This problem is...
Is Microfinance Really For The Poor Or Is It Just...
Microfinance is a type of lending practice in which the extremely poor will supposedly be benefited by giving them small loans to start up a business or a farm, and in return the banks will receive profit in the form of interest rates. But like loaners here in the United States, some succeed and some don’t. In this week’s reading, the story of Enzar Gull from Afghanistan exemplified one of those...
How to Fight a Derivative Inspired
I’m sure this is too long to count as a blog post, and doesn’t hit on all the points required, but reading this article had me thinking. Hopefully it can lead to some sort of discussion. Enjoy…
Gambling is often dismissively characterized by most people as a vice, and looked upon as a diversion from life’s more serious aspects; for many of us here in New Jersey, including...
Lobbying, Predatory Lending, and the Financial...
The article Geographies of the Financial Crisis got me thinking about another article that I read for a different class. It’s a pdf called “A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis”. Specifically, it relates to Aalbers’ discussion of predatory lending. I mention it by way of drawing attention to one aspect of the structure of predatory lending, which we may...
Reading Note
Essentially, the main point of the readings for this week was to exhibit how the mortgage crisis was created and how it can be placed on a global scale. How the crisis emerged was this: People would go to banks to take out loans for a home to buy, assuming they had good credit rating. This was back in the mid-20th century. The development of government sponsored corporations, Freddie Mac and...
Blog Post- "Spaces of Finance"
Manuel Aalbers’ article, “Geography of the Housing Crisis,” one of this week’s readings, is an insightful article in the sense that it is able to succinctly reduce the complex collapse of branches of the world’s economic system to obvious cause and effect relationships. Most interesting to me was the section dealing with predatory loans and the statistics related to...
subprime crisis and globalization
Despite the presence of several other factors, it has become clear over the last few years that the emergence of the subprime real estate market was the predominant occurrence that led the United States into the recession that began sometime in 2008. Consequently, those hit hardest by the recession were lower-class and middle-class Americans. Characteristically less educated, these citizens were...
The Unreformable: Post-Crisis Neoliberalism
There is nothing quite like a crisis to make one question the fundamental truths. For a short while at least, the 2008 financial “meltdown” allowed mainstream media to question the trustworthiness of our deregulated financial institutions and the neoliberal politics behind them. But despite the questioning, the subsequent outrage and eventually some organized protest (Occupy et al.) little seems...
2007-8 financial crisis and causes
In this week’s, readings, it is argued that many of our current economic problems were at least in part caused by the bundling of large amounts of mortgages by investment banks from all over the world. Much of this activity occurred during the early and mid-2000’s, a period of a massive increase in mortgage borrowing and lending, in the hopes that this bundling of mortgages would be extremely...
Financial Crisis
The recent financial crisis represents the general theme of this week’s readings. The specific focus of each article varied, but the main points remained consistent between all of them: Banks took advantage of light regulations and engaged in predatory lending and highly risky practices that had significant spatial spillover effects. For example, “Geographies of the Financial Crisis” describes how...
Taking our European friends into account
After 1980, the financial industry in the US entered a long period of deregulation. In 1990, derivatives became popular. Mortgages became bunched together with debts and loans to create CDO’s or collateralized debt obligations. Many were rated AAA when they were actually of low value, and they were sold as if they were of high value. The reason for this is that speculators could bet against...
Financial Crisis
A financial crisis can be the result of assets or institutions being overvalued, and can be worsened by investor behavior. A financial crisis is commonly related to panic or a bank run which is where several bank customers attempt to withdraw their bank deposits at the same time and the bank’s reserve are not enough to cover the withdrawals. The investors expect the value of those assets to drop...
“Today, debate on the politics and legitimacy of speculative practices is more...”
– Apropos this week’s readings: Marieke de Goede here offers a short piece on “How to Fight a Derivative.” You might remember we read a small book review she wrote about risk a few weeks ago…
More thoughts on Neoliberalism
(There was a techno-glitch that prevented me from receiving this post on time, but here it is. — RN)
Neoliberalism is the economic philosophy which holds that government intervention in the economy should be as limited as possible. Adherents to this philosophy therefore tend to support government policies that limit government regulations and labor, business and banking practices, as well...
Syria Timeline
For those of you trying to keep up with/broaden your understanding of the events in Syria, here’s a link to a pretty useful interactive map from the Guardian.
Neoliberalism
In the middle of the 1970’s the emergence of the idea of Neoliberalism, was the child idea of two previous policies. “Both capitalism and communism in their raw forms had failed, they argued. The way ahead was to construct the right blend of state, market and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well being and stability. ” Neoliberalism created a system that deregulated...
More about the Greeks
From This American Life on the euro, the greek austerity measures, and general edification from Ira Glass and Co.
The human side of austerity
We’ve been discussing trends an macro scale policy shifts. Here’s a story that explores the ways that they alter the lives of quote unquote people…
The 2013 Budget Proposal as an infographic →
This is an infographic that shows many of the additions and subtractions of the proposed budget for next year. Consider the types of things that are growing, and what is shrinking as they relate to our discussion of neoliberalism today…
While on the subject of objects...
Here’s a link to the BBC’s recent exploration of a History of the World in 100 Objects. You can download the podcasts—each between 15 and 20 minutes—and explore the ways that ‘things’ have a capacity to act in social space in ways that extend far beyond their physical limits and (often) their intended uses.
In a similar vein, Sherry Terkel writes about the...
On Border Politics
Yesterday’s class discussion is illustrated nicely in this map and article from The Economist.
…permanent in its effects…discontinuous in its action…
The Cyberflâneur
The New York Times has an interesting opinion piece about the ways that wandering through the space of the internet has, like the art of wandering through the space of the city in the 19th century, come to pass. An interesting read.
