Ramaa Vasudevan
Biographic Data
| ID | 832200 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ramaa Vasudevan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ramaa |
| FAMILY NAME | Vasudevan |
| SIGNATURE | VASUDEVAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Colorado State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5052-7247 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 28 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Nexus of Public Debt and Private Finance: Forging the International Monetary Order
The contested alliance of state and finance embodied in public debt forms a nexus that has shaped the emergence of capitalism, and has also strengthened and transformed as capitalism developed. The state’s recourse to debt is the foundation for the emergence of a powerful financier class, but this powerful class of financiers has also come to depend on the state to provide the fodder for its continual growth. This paper investigates the key role …
The gold-exchange standard in colonial India: Foreshadowing the monetary hierarchy of the international state-credit standard
This paper investigates how the concrete operation of the gold-exchange standard in colonial India imposed a process of financial subordination embedding colonial India in the currency hierarchy of British sterling. This system was instrumental in entrenching a core-periphery asymmetry that undergirded Britain’s financial supremacy, providing elasticity to the sterling funding mechanisms of international money-markets by mobilizing the reserves o…
The Doom-Loop Redux: The Corporate Bond-Purchase Program and the Political Economy of the Fed’s Pandemic Response
The Fed’s recent corporate-bond buying program is approached from a political economy perspective, placing it in the context of its interventions during the 2008 crisis, and the broader swathe of facilities launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The response in 2008 can be understood in terms of the doom-loop arising from the structural power exercised by finance and the implication of the Fed in the political compulsions of helping prese…
Women’s Self-Employment as a Developmental Strategy: The Dual Constraints of Care Work and Aggregate Demand
The promotion of self-employment through financial inclusion initiatives has been adopted as a means of harnessing the entrepreneurial and productive capacities of women within the neoliberal developmental policy framework. This study presents a simple analytical model in the Post-Keynesian tradition to investigate the linkages between self-employment, aggregate demand, and unpaid care work by developing a two-sector model. It shows that a develo…
Crypto Convulsions, Digital Delusions, and the Inexorable Logic of Finance Capitalism
The crypto winter, Ramaa Vasudevan writes, is here. Cryptocurrency, far from being a democratizing force in finance, has led to only further concentrations of wealth and power and increased precarity within the financial sector. The recent fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is only the beginning
Friends and benefits? Endogenous rotating savings and credit associations as alternative for women’s empowerment in India
The network of empire and universal capitalism: Imperialism and the laws of capitalist competition
Imperialism in the context of capitalism has been explained either in terms of the suspension of the laws of capitalist competition, or by focusing on the relationship of capitalism with pre-capitalist regions. This paper puts forward a theory of imperialism that is specific and internal to capitalism. The argument put forward in this paper is that the critical element of the empire of capital is the manner in which imperial power is exercised to…
Shadow Money in the 19th Century: Is Marx Relevant for Understanding Contemporary Shadow Money
The growth of shadow money, since the 1980s, has implications for both central bank policy and the theorization of money. However, modern shadow money has a historical analogue in the private bill market of 19th century England This article explores the relevance of Marx’s logical and historical analysis of the evolution of the forms and functions of money in capitalist economies, and his concrete analysis of the bill market in order to understan…
The Rise of the Global Corporation and the Polarization of the Managerial Class in the US
This article seeks to understand the sharp divergence in the earnings of top managerial executives in the US since the 1980s, within the historical context of the evolution and transformation of the corporate landscape through the 20th century. In particular, as US multinational corporations expanded their reach to the global market at the end of the 20th century and offshoring increased, globally dispersed US multinational corporations began to …
Profits without production: A Comment
Libor'ing Under the Market Illusion
Sandwiched between revelations of mounting losses ($5.8 billion and rising) at JP Morgan in the face of bungled bets by a trader known as the London Whale, and allegations of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and breaches of U.S. sanctions by HSBC, the disclosures of deliberate rigging of the Libor rate by Barclay's Bank might appear mundane and a trifle boring in comparison. It is, however, this scandal about an arcane interest rate that…
Terms of Trade, Competitive Advantage, and Trade Patterns
This paper investigates the competitive determination of the pattern of trade, seen as a choice of technique problem within a two-country, two-commodity, circulating capital model. It seeks to re-examine the analytical premises of the principle of comparative advantage. The establishment of competitive advantage is addressed in a Sraffian framework that allows the integration of the choice of technique problem to issues of growth and distribution…
From the Gold Standard to the Floating Dollar Standard: An Appraisal in the Light of Marx’s Theory of Money
The paper explores the insights offered by Marx’s analysis of the emergence of “world money” into the workings of the international gold standard period and the post-Bretton Woods floating dollar standard. In a curious inversion of the traditional formulations drawing on Lenin, imperial hegemony in today’s context would seem to be associated with net capital imports (rather than exports) by the dominant country. In particular, I argue that in a c…
The Credit Crisis: Is the International Role of the Dollar at Stake
As the first tremors of the looming financial crisis ripped through Wall Street, with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007, the dollar plunged sharply. Perversely however, even as some financial pundits were foretelling its collapse, the deepening of the crisis following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 actually saw the dollar gain ground sharply (for the first time since the steady decline that be…
Finance, Imperialism, and the Hegemony of the Dollar
The July-August 2007 crisis in subprime mortgage markets precipitated the collapse of the market for asset-backed securities, forcing huge write-downs of more than $45 billion on the balance sheets of major banks. In the aftershock, interbank lending dried up. Bond insurers and money market funds were beset by a loss of confidence as the credit squeeze spread. The plunge in stock markets in January 2008 suggests that the repercussions of the coll…
Friends and benefits? Endogenous rotating savings and credit associations as alternative for women’s empowerment in India
Women’s Self-Employment as a Developmental Strategy: The Dual Constraints of Care Work and Aggregate Demand
The promotion of self-employment through financial inclusion initiatives has been adopted as a means of harnessing the entrepreneurial and productive capacities of women within the neoliberal developmental policy framework. This study presents a simple analytical model in the Post-Keynesian tradition to investigate the linkages between self-employment, aggregate demand, and unpaid care work by developing a two-sector model. It shows that a develo…
Terms of Trade, Competitive Advantage, and Trade Patterns
This paper investigates the competitive determination of the pattern of trade, seen as a choice of technique problem within a two-country, two-commodity, circulating capital model. It seeks to re-examine the analytical premises of the principle of comparative advantage. The establishment of competitive advantage is addressed in a Sraffian framework that allows the integration of the choice of technique problem to issues of growth and distribution…
The gold-exchange standard in colonial India: Foreshadowing the monetary hierarchy of the international state-credit standard
This paper investigates how the concrete operation of the gold-exchange standard in colonial India imposed a process of financial subordination embedding colonial India in the currency hierarchy of British sterling. This system was instrumental in entrenching a core-periphery asymmetry that undergirded Britain’s financial supremacy, providing elasticity to the sterling funding mechanisms of international money-markets by mobilizing the reserves o…
The network of empire and universal capitalism: Imperialism and the laws of capitalist competition
Imperialism in the context of capitalism has been explained either in terms of the suspension of the laws of capitalist competition, or by focusing on the relationship of capitalism with pre-capitalist regions. This paper puts forward a theory of imperialism that is specific and internal to capitalism. The argument put forward in this paper is that the critical element of the empire of capital is the manner in which imperial power is exercised to…
The Rise of the Global Corporation and the Polarization of the Managerial Class in the US
This article seeks to understand the sharp divergence in the earnings of top managerial executives in the US since the 1980s, within the historical context of the evolution and transformation of the corporate landscape through the 20th century. In particular, as US multinational corporations expanded their reach to the global market at the end of the 20th century and offshoring increased, globally dispersed US multinational corporations began to …
Libor'ing Under the Market Illusion
Sandwiched between revelations of mounting losses ($5.8 billion and rising) at JP Morgan in the face of bungled bets by a trader known as the London Whale, and allegations of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and breaches of U.S. sanctions by HSBC, the disclosures of deliberate rigging of the Libor rate by Barclay's Bank might appear mundane and a trifle boring in comparison. It is, however, this scandal about an arcane interest rate that…
The Nexus of Public Debt and Private Finance: Forging the International Monetary Order
The contested alliance of state and finance embodied in public debt forms a nexus that has shaped the emergence of capitalism, and has also strengthened and transformed as capitalism developed. The state’s recourse to debt is the foundation for the emergence of a powerful financier class, but this powerful class of financiers has also come to depend on the state to provide the fodder for its continual growth. This paper investigates the key role …
Crypto Convulsions, Digital Delusions, and the Inexorable Logic of Finance Capitalism
The crypto winter, Ramaa Vasudevan writes, is here. Cryptocurrency, far from being a democratizing force in finance, has led to only further concentrations of wealth and power and increased precarity within the financial sector. The recent fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is only the beginning
Shadow Money in the 19th Century: Is Marx Relevant for Understanding Contemporary Shadow Money
The growth of shadow money, since the 1980s, has implications for both central bank policy and the theorization of money. However, modern shadow money has a historical analogue in the private bill market of 19th century England This article explores the relevance of Marx’s logical and historical analysis of the evolution of the forms and functions of money in capitalist economies, and his concrete analysis of the bill market in order to understan…
Profits without production: A Comment
The Credit Crisis: Is the International Role of the Dollar at Stake
As the first tremors of the looming financial crisis ripped through Wall Street, with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007, the dollar plunged sharply. Perversely however, even as some financial pundits were foretelling its collapse, the deepening of the crisis following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 actually saw the dollar gain ground sharply (for the first time since the steady decline that be…
Finance, Imperialism, and the Hegemony of the Dollar
The July-August 2007 crisis in subprime mortgage markets precipitated the collapse of the market for asset-backed securities, forcing huge write-downs of more than $45 billion on the balance sheets of major banks. In the aftershock, interbank lending dried up. Bond insurers and money market funds were beset by a loss of confidence as the credit squeeze spread. The plunge in stock markets in January 2008 suggests that the repercussions of the coll…
Finance, Imperialism, and the Hegemony of the Dollar
The July-August 2007 crisis in subprime mortgage markets precipitated the collapse of the market for asset-backed securities, forcing huge write-downs of more than $45 billion on the balance sheets of major banks. In the aftershock, interbank lending dried up. Bond insurers and money market funds were beset by a loss of confidence as the credit squeeze spread. The plunge in stock markets in January 2008 suggests that the repercussions of the coll…
From the Gold Standard to the Floating Dollar Standard: An Appraisal in the Light of Marx’s Theory of Money
The paper explores the insights offered by Marx’s analysis of the emergence of “world money” into the workings of the international gold standard period and the post-Bretton Woods floating dollar standard. In a curious inversion of the traditional formulations drawing on Lenin, imperial hegemony in today’s context would seem to be associated with net capital imports (rather than exports) by the dominant country. In particular, I argue that in a c…
The Credit Crisis: Is the International Role of the Dollar at Stake
As the first tremors of the looming financial crisis ripped through Wall Street, with the meltdown of the subprime mortgage market in the summer of 2007, the dollar plunged sharply. Perversely however, even as some financial pundits were foretelling its collapse, the deepening of the crisis following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 actually saw the dollar gain ground sharply (for the first time since the steady decline that be…
Terms of Trade, Competitive Advantage, and Trade Patterns
This paper investigates the competitive determination of the pattern of trade, seen as a choice of technique problem within a two-country, two-commodity, circulating capital model. It seeks to re-examine the analytical premises of the principle of comparative advantage. The establishment of competitive advantage is addressed in a Sraffian framework that allows the integration of the choice of technique problem to issues of growth and distribution…
Libor'ing Under the Market Illusion
Sandwiched between revelations of mounting losses ($5.8 billion and rising) at JP Morgan in the face of bungled bets by a trader known as the London Whale, and allegations of money laundering for Mexican drug cartels and breaches of U.S. sanctions by HSBC, the disclosures of deliberate rigging of the Libor rate by Barclay's Bank might appear mundane and a trifle boring in comparison. It is, however, this scandal about an arcane interest rate that…
Profits without production: A Comment
The Rise of the Global Corporation and the Polarization of the Managerial Class in the US
This article seeks to understand the sharp divergence in the earnings of top managerial executives in the US since the 1980s, within the historical context of the evolution and transformation of the corporate landscape through the 20th century. In particular, as US multinational corporations expanded their reach to the global market at the end of the 20th century and offshoring increased, globally dispersed US multinational corporations began to …
Shadow Money in the 19th Century: Is Marx Relevant for Understanding Contemporary Shadow Money
The growth of shadow money, since the 1980s, has implications for both central bank policy and the theorization of money. However, modern shadow money has a historical analogue in the private bill market of 19th century England This article explores the relevance of Marx’s logical and historical analysis of the evolution of the forms and functions of money in capitalist economies, and his concrete analysis of the bill market in order to understan…
Friends and benefits? Endogenous rotating savings and credit associations as alternative for women’s empowerment in India
The network of empire and universal capitalism: Imperialism and the laws of capitalist competition
Imperialism in the context of capitalism has been explained either in terms of the suspension of the laws of capitalist competition, or by focusing on the relationship of capitalism with pre-capitalist regions. This paper puts forward a theory of imperialism that is specific and internal to capitalism. The argument put forward in this paper is that the critical element of the empire of capital is the manner in which imperial power is exercised to…
The Doom-Loop Redux: The Corporate Bond-Purchase Program and the Political Economy of the Fed’s Pandemic Response
The Fed’s recent corporate-bond buying program is approached from a political economy perspective, placing it in the context of its interventions during the 2008 crisis, and the broader swathe of facilities launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The response in 2008 can be understood in terms of the doom-loop arising from the structural power exercised by finance and the implication of the Fed in the political compulsions of helping prese…
Women’s Self-Employment as a Developmental Strategy: The Dual Constraints of Care Work and Aggregate Demand
The promotion of self-employment through financial inclusion initiatives has been adopted as a means of harnessing the entrepreneurial and productive capacities of women within the neoliberal developmental policy framework. This study presents a simple analytical model in the Post-Keynesian tradition to investigate the linkages between self-employment, aggregate demand, and unpaid care work by developing a two-sector model. It shows that a develo…
Crypto Convulsions, Digital Delusions, and the Inexorable Logic of Finance Capitalism
The crypto winter, Ramaa Vasudevan writes, is here. Cryptocurrency, far from being a democratizing force in finance, has led to only further concentrations of wealth and power and increased precarity within the financial sector. The recent fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is only the beginning
The gold-exchange standard in colonial India: Foreshadowing the monetary hierarchy of the international state-credit standard
This paper investigates how the concrete operation of the gold-exchange standard in colonial India imposed a process of financial subordination embedding colonial India in the currency hierarchy of British sterling. This system was instrumental in entrenching a core-periphery asymmetry that undergirded Britain’s financial supremacy, providing elasticity to the sterling funding mechanisms of international money-markets by mobilizing the reserves o…
The Nexus of Public Debt and Private Finance: Forging the International Monetary Order
The contested alliance of state and finance embodied in public debt forms a nexus that has shaped the emergence of capitalism, and has also strengthened and transformed as capitalism developed. The state’s recourse to debt is the foundation for the emergence of a powerful financier class, but this powerful class of financiers has also come to depend on the state to provide the fodder for its continual growth. This paper investigates the key role …
Economics (15 works) · Political science (10 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (8 works) · Market economy (7 works) · Finance (6 works) · Global Financial Crisis and Policies (6 works) · Keynesian economics (6 works) · Monetary economics (6 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (5 works) · Law (5 works)