Dick Bryan
Biographic Data
| ID | 91046 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dick Bryan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dick |
| FAMILY NAME | Bryan |
| SIGNATURE | BRYAN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-9582-2196 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 254 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Protocols for postcapitalist finance
Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit). An insightful review by William Morgan (2024) probes some key dimensions of our project…
Capital unchained
The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as ‘goodwill’ has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a …
Reframing austerity
Austerity in the twenty-first century is different, compared both with the past, and across locations. This analysis explores the different role played by households in policies designed to maintain financial market liquidity in the context of aspirations of state deficit reduction. While in Europe there is austerity as popularly depicted, in the United States, where mortgage-backed securities have become central to monetary policy, the agenda is…
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an understandable focus on the financial fragility and contagion aspects of shadow banking. This article argues that shadow banking is important for another set of reasons. It has been well established that shadow banking permits the transformation of assets and financial claims. It has also been established that fiscal and regulatory arbitrage occurs through shadow banking, and associate…
The unaccountable risks of Libor
One of the on-going consequences of recent financial crises seems to be that the conventional 'anchor' measures of global finance (such as the US dollar, treasury bonds and AAA rated securities) are no longer playing the anchoring role once believed of them. LIBOR now needs to be added to this list and not just because it has been tarnished by illegal practices, but because it is looking increasingly surpassed by financial market practices. LIBOR…
Decomposing Money
Debates about the nature and origin of the social foundations of money can have no closure. There is a range of credible, but sometimes inconsistent, positions. This paper conjectures that the framing of debates is itself precluding the recognition that these ‘foundations’ are themselves conjuncturally specific. At critical historical points of monetary crisis or innovation, it is the divergence between theories that gives analytical potence, for…
Risk and Value
The process of financialization of accumulation brings to the fore the issue of risk and risk trading. This article explores the way finance and risk relate to capital accumulation and how risk might be integrated into Marxian value theory. It looks first at what it would mean to incorporate risk into conventional measurements of value and then opens up alternative ways of thinking about the process of production, to recognize frontier developmen…
Shoplifters of the World Unite! Law and Culture in Financialized Times
The last two decades have seen significant growth and change in the character of the interactions between working-class households and financial markets. Individuals and households are bearing more and more of the risks that were once managed by governments and employers, and financial markets have developed a vast range of products to facilitate that risk transfer. This has put households at the centre of financial innovation, requiring the exte…
Political Economy and Housing in the Twenty-first Century – From Mobile Homes to Liquid Housing
The recent Global Financial Crisis started as a crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and rapidly spread to a wider financial crisis. This article suggests that beyond the crisis, we can now see that households are playing an evolving role as a site of risk absorption. In so doing, households have become a frontier of capital accumulation, not just as producers and consumers, but also as financial traders. Households are increasingly buying…
Financial Derivatives as Social Policy beyond Crisis
The period since the global financial crisis has seen financial derivatives not only grow quantitatively in financial markets but also expand socially as a calculative logic, giving increasing precision to the concept of capital and hence class relations. The logic of derivatives involves deconstructing 'things' into a spectrum of tradable risks. The article identifies the ways in which this logic is spreading into an increasing range of social, …
Fundamental value
Fundamental value is a canonical category in both Marxian and neo-classical economics. In application to finance and financial crisis, it is laden with complexity. For Marxists, it has underscored a focus on the distinctions between production and circulation, real and fictitious capital. These debates have dominated Marxian responses to the financial crisis. In mainstream finance and economics, the term has undergone transformation and historica…
Money, Financial Regulation and the Fragility of Civil Peace
In most Western countries, the ongoing global financial crisis is causing economic insecurity manifesting as market volatility and fear of escalating defaults. In many of these countries, it is also producing social and political upheaval. A growing number of commentators use terms like ‘catastrophe’, ‘abyss’ and ‘brink’ to describe the consequences of potential financial meltdown. But they usually do so only figuratively, in describing the many …
Going forward
Turnover in global financial markets was relatively unaffected by the global financial crisis. In the more than 3 years since the crash, these markets have been expanding and evolving. This paper contends that new forms of financial markets have become integral to capitalist finance, and they are integrating households into accumulation in new ways. They call for new ways of thinking about the social role of finance. The contradictions and tensio…
Why We Need to Understand Derivatives in Relation to Money
The issue of the relation between financial derivatives, money and crisis remains one of on-going debate within Marxism. This paper takes issue with a recent contribution to this debate by Tony Norfield. We contend that the relationship between financial derivatives and the concept of ‘money’ needs to be framed in the context of a changing understanding of liquidity, and that issues of crisis and renewed accumulation are better understood though …
An important failure
This paper introduces a theme section on knowledge limits in and after the financial crisis. It explores how and why practitioners have generally responded less conservatively to crisis than academics, and argues that academics within a variety of problematics could do more by reflecting critically on the heroic ideas about the role of knowledge which were current across the social sciences in the decade before the crisis. It then turns to introd…
Financialization and Marx
Financialization challenges some established ways of thinking within Marxist categories. We explore the way in which financialization is not simply shifting the balance of power between classes and generating economic volatility, but also re-constituting our understanding of class (as a formal economic category) and class relations. In particular, we examine how financialization is re-constituting labor as a form of capital, and giving capital a …
The Global Foreign Exchange Market
Markets for foreign exchange derivatives are turning over $US 5.5 trillion per day and they are having a critical economic and social impact. But they are little understood in the international relations and international political economy (IPE) literature. This paper introduces the key themes of derivative markets and reports on the results of the most recent Bank for International Settlements' triennial survey of global foreign exchange and der…
Minimum Living Standards and the Working-Class Surplus
In the light of growing household indebtedness in Australia and the stark experience of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States of America this article develops a parallel between the lending practices of current financial institutions, and debates around the 1907 Harvester Judgement; in particular, the different perspectives of Mr Justice Higgins and H.V. McKay on the role of minimum standards of living and the potential for wages to …
Financial derivatives and the theory of money
Financial derivatives are used and counted as money, but it is unclear exactly what sort of money they are. This article explores the monetary role of financial derivatives in securing the global financial system. It finds that derivatives commensurate the values of different forms of financial assets, and, in the process, they facilitate continuity across different forms of money. In this role they are a form of commodity money, but very differe…
Derivatives and the Development of Capitalist Relations
In earlier chapters, we identified the growth of financial derivatives, and especially their generalised use by large corporations for risk management, as an emerging and decisive change in capitalist development. We contended that the growth of financial derivatives in the 1980s is akin to the watershed created by the growth of joint stock companies in the middle-to-late nineteenth century. Derivatives are transforming our understanding of capit…
Capitalism with Derivatives
What are the links between things as diverse as the prices of pork bellies, interest rates, and corporate stock? They are all being translated into risk and priced through the system of derivative mar
Money in Capitalism or Capitalist Money
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities
The Rush to Regulate
There has been a significant shift in the momentum of national economic policy in Australia, from the market as an end in itself, towards a regulated policy agenda that asserts the social, cultural and economic rule of capital. This ‘new’ policy is what neo‐liberalism really involves. Arguments about ‘free markets’ and ‘economic rationalism’ fail to recognise the shift and are thus not germane to current policy analysis
Still calling Australia home? International integration and the framing of national economic problems in recent official reports
International capital and the valuing of labour
Financial Derivatives as Social Policy beyond Crisis
The period since the global financial crisis has seen financial derivatives not only grow quantitatively in financial markets but also expand socially as a calculative logic, giving increasing precision to the concept of capital and hence class relations. The logic of derivatives involves deconstructing 'things' into a spectrum of tradable risks. The article identifies the ways in which this logic is spreading into an increasing range of social, …
Financial derivatives and the theory of money
Financial derivatives are used and counted as money, but it is unclear exactly what sort of money they are. This article explores the monetary role of financial derivatives in securing the global financial system. It finds that derivatives commensurate the values of different forms of financial assets, and, in the process, they facilitate continuity across different forms of money. In this role they are a form of commodity money, but very differe…
Capital unchained
The rise of intangible assets such as brand names, research and development, patents and other forms of abstract capital such as digital platforms and data flows has confounded extant measures and concepts of capital and accumulation. What used to be a residual asset category known as ‘goodwill’ has now overtaken so-called fixed or tangible assets in the profitability and valuation of many leading corporations. Yet these intangible assets lead a …
An important failure
This paper introduces a theme section on knowledge limits in and after the financial crisis. It explores how and why practitioners have generally responded less conservatively to crisis than academics, and argues that academics within a variety of problematics could do more by reflecting critically on the heroic ideas about the role of knowledge which were current across the social sciences in the decade before the crisis. It then turns to introd…
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an understandable focus on the financial fragility and contagion aspects of shadow banking. This article argues that shadow banking is important for another set of reasons. It has been well established that shadow banking permits the transformation of assets and financial claims. It has also been established that fiscal and regulatory arbitrage occurs through shadow banking, and associate…
Fundamental value
Fundamental value is a canonical category in both Marxian and neo-classical economics. In application to finance and financial crisis, it is laden with complexity. For Marxists, it has underscored a focus on the distinctions between production and circulation, real and fictitious capital. These debates have dominated Marxian responses to the financial crisis. In mainstream finance and economics, the term has undergone transformation and historica…
Political Economy and Housing in the Twenty-first Century – From Mobile Homes to Liquid Housing
The recent Global Financial Crisis started as a crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and rapidly spread to a wider financial crisis. This article suggests that beyond the crisis, we can now see that households are playing an evolving role as a site of risk absorption. In so doing, households have become a frontier of capital accumulation, not just as producers and consumers, but also as financial traders. Households are increasingly buying…
Risk and Value
The process of financialization of accumulation brings to the fore the issue of risk and risk trading. This article explores the way finance and risk relate to capital accumulation and how risk might be integrated into Marxian value theory. It looks first at what it would mean to incorporate risk into conventional measurements of value and then opens up alternative ways of thinking about the process of production, to recognize frontier developmen…
The unaccountable risks of Libor
One of the on-going consequences of recent financial crises seems to be that the conventional 'anchor' measures of global finance (such as the US dollar, treasury bonds and AAA rated securities) are no longer playing the anchoring role once believed of them. LIBOR now needs to be added to this list and not just because it has been tarnished by illegal practices, but because it is looking increasingly surpassed by financial market practices. LIBOR…
Decomposing Money
Debates about the nature and origin of the social foundations of money can have no closure. There is a range of credible, but sometimes inconsistent, positions. This paper conjectures that the framing of debates is itself precluding the recognition that these ‘foundations’ are themselves conjuncturally specific. At critical historical points of monetary crisis or innovation, it is the divergence between theories that gives analytical potence, for…
Why We Need to Understand Derivatives in Relation to Money
The issue of the relation between financial derivatives, money and crisis remains one of on-going debate within Marxism. This paper takes issue with a recent contribution to this debate by Tony Norfield. We contend that the relationship between financial derivatives and the concept of ‘money’ needs to be framed in the context of a changing understanding of liquidity, and that issues of crisis and renewed accumulation are better understood though …
Reframing austerity
Austerity in the twenty-first century is different, compared both with the past, and across locations. This analysis explores the different role played by households in policies designed to maintain financial market liquidity in the context of aspirations of state deficit reduction. While in Europe there is austerity as popularly depicted, in the United States, where mortgage-backed securities have become central to monetary policy, the agenda is…
Going forward
Turnover in global financial markets was relatively unaffected by the global financial crisis. In the more than 3 years since the crash, these markets have been expanding and evolving. This paper contends that new forms of financial markets have become integral to capitalist finance, and they are integrating households into accumulation in new ways. They call for new ways of thinking about the social role of finance. The contradictions and tensio…
Money in Capitalism or Capitalist Money
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities
The Rush to Regulate
There has been a significant shift in the momentum of national economic policy in Australia, from the market as an end in itself, towards a regulated policy agenda that asserts the social, cultural and economic rule of capital. This ‘new’ policy is what neo‐liberalism really involves. Arguments about ‘free markets’ and ‘economic rationalism’ fail to recognise the shift and are thus not germane to current policy analysis
The Global Foreign Exchange Market
Markets for foreign exchange derivatives are turning over $US 5.5 trillion per day and they are having a critical economic and social impact. But they are little understood in the international relations and international political economy (IPE) literature. This paper introduces the key themes of derivative markets and reports on the results of the most recent Bank for International Settlements' triennial survey of global foreign exchange and der…
International Accumulation and the Contradictions of National Monetary Policy
With the international mobility of money, and the integration of national capital markets, the role of nation states in securing the money system becomes ambiguous, for nation states can exert only a partial impact on the value of (internationalized) money. The effect is that national monetary policy comes to reflect the contradictions between different sections of capital which are themselves integrated into international accumulation in differe…
"Natural" and "Improved" Land in Marx's Theory of Rent
Marxian value theory has always had some difficulty with incorporating the products of nature into the calculation of value. Right at the start of Capital, Marx ([1894] 1976) insists that it is not the purpose of his theory to explain the contribution of all phenomena to the value of output. This may be satisfactory as a general proposition of the objectives of Marxian value analysis, but it faces difficulty in the understanding of ground rent, f…
International Accumulation and the Contradictions of National Monetary Policy
With the international mobility of money, and the integration of national capital markets, the role of nation states in securing the money system becomes ambiguous, for nation states can exert only a partial impact on the value of (internationalized) money. The effect is that national monetary policy comes to reflect the contradictions between different sections of capital which are themselves integrated into international accumulation in differe…
The internationalisation of capital and Marxian value theory
Marxist value analysis has paid little attention to the international movement of capital. This paper contends that there are different but compatible concepts of international capital movement in value theory, which are associated with different meanings of 'capital' in each volume of Karl Marx's Capital. With particular emphasis on a Volume III conception of international prices of production, the paper contends that exchange rates and a nation…
The Chase Across The Globe
Over the last 20 years — and especially over the last decade — the international expansion of money and commodities and the international relocation of production have grown tremendously. As a result, there now exists a real contradiction in accumulation: Although global in orientation, it remains structured by the nation state. Conventional economic literature generally explains the international economy as exogenous to the national economy. Tho…
Still calling Australia home? International integration and the framing of national economic problems in recent official reports
International capital and the valuing of labour
The Rush to Regulate
There has been a significant shift in the momentum of national economic policy in Australia, from the market as an end in itself, towards a regulated policy agenda that asserts the social, cultural and economic rule of capital. This ‘new’ policy is what neo‐liberalism really involves. Arguments about ‘free markets’ and ‘economic rationalism’ fail to recognise the shift and are thus not germane to current policy analysis
Derivatives and the Development of Capitalist Relations
In earlier chapters, we identified the growth of financial derivatives, and especially their generalised use by large corporations for risk management, as an emerging and decisive change in capitalist development. We contended that the growth of financial derivatives in the 1980s is akin to the watershed created by the growth of joint stock companies in the middle-to-late nineteenth century. Derivatives are transforming our understanding of capit…
Capitalism with Derivatives
What are the links between things as diverse as the prices of pork bellies, interest rates, and corporate stock? They are all being translated into risk and priced through the system of derivative mar
Money in Capitalism or Capitalist Money
The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities
Financial derivatives and the theory of money
Financial derivatives are used and counted as money, but it is unclear exactly what sort of money they are. This article explores the monetary role of financial derivatives in securing the global financial system. It finds that derivatives commensurate the values of different forms of financial assets, and, in the process, they facilitate continuity across different forms of money. In this role they are a form of commodity money, but very differe…
The Global Foreign Exchange Market
Markets for foreign exchange derivatives are turning over $US 5.5 trillion per day and they are having a critical economic and social impact. But they are little understood in the international relations and international political economy (IPE) literature. This paper introduces the key themes of derivative markets and reports on the results of the most recent Bank for International Settlements' triennial survey of global foreign exchange and der…
Minimum Living Standards and the Working-Class Surplus
In the light of growing household indebtedness in Australia and the stark experience of the sub-prime mortgage market in the United States of America this article develops a parallel between the lending practices of current financial institutions, and debates around the 1907 Harvester Judgement; in particular, the different perspectives of Mr Justice Higgins and H.V. McKay on the role of minimum standards of living and the potential for wages to …
Financialization and Marx
Financialization challenges some established ways of thinking within Marxist categories. We explore the way in which financialization is not simply shifting the balance of power between classes and generating economic volatility, but also re-constituting our understanding of class (as a formal economic category) and class relations. In particular, we examine how financialization is re-constituting labor as a form of capital, and giving capital a …
Money, Financial Regulation and the Fragility of Civil Peace
In most Western countries, the ongoing global financial crisis is causing economic insecurity manifesting as market volatility and fear of escalating defaults. In many of these countries, it is also producing social and political upheaval. A growing number of commentators use terms like ‘catastrophe’, ‘abyss’ and ‘brink’ to describe the consequences of potential financial meltdown. But they usually do so only figuratively, in describing the many …
Going forward
Turnover in global financial markets was relatively unaffected by the global financial crisis. In the more than 3 years since the crash, these markets have been expanding and evolving. This paper contends that new forms of financial markets have become integral to capitalist finance, and they are integrating households into accumulation in new ways. They call for new ways of thinking about the social role of finance. The contradictions and tensio…
Why We Need to Understand Derivatives in Relation to Money
The issue of the relation between financial derivatives, money and crisis remains one of on-going debate within Marxism. This paper takes issue with a recent contribution to this debate by Tony Norfield. We contend that the relationship between financial derivatives and the concept of ‘money’ needs to be framed in the context of a changing understanding of liquidity, and that issues of crisis and renewed accumulation are better understood though …
An important failure
This paper introduces a theme section on knowledge limits in and after the financial crisis. It explores how and why practitioners have generally responded less conservatively to crisis than academics, and argues that academics within a variety of problematics could do more by reflecting critically on the heroic ideas about the role of knowledge which were current across the social sciences in the decade before the crisis. It then turns to introd…
Fundamental value
Fundamental value is a canonical category in both Marxian and neo-classical economics. In application to finance and financial crisis, it is laden with complexity. For Marxists, it has underscored a focus on the distinctions between production and circulation, real and fictitious capital. These debates have dominated Marxian responses to the financial crisis. In mainstream finance and economics, the term has undergone transformation and historica…
Shoplifters of the World Unite! Law and Culture in Financialized Times
The last two decades have seen significant growth and change in the character of the interactions between working-class households and financial markets. Individuals and households are bearing more and more of the risks that were once managed by governments and employers, and financial markets have developed a vast range of products to facilitate that risk transfer. This has put households at the centre of financial innovation, requiring the exte…
Political Economy and Housing in the Twenty-first Century – From Mobile Homes to Liquid Housing
The recent Global Financial Crisis started as a crisis in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and rapidly spread to a wider financial crisis. This article suggests that beyond the crisis, we can now see that households are playing an evolving role as a site of risk absorption. In so doing, households have become a frontier of capital accumulation, not just as producers and consumers, but also as financial traders. Households are increasingly buying…
Financial Derivatives as Social Policy beyond Crisis
The period since the global financial crisis has seen financial derivatives not only grow quantitatively in financial markets but also expand socially as a calculative logic, giving increasing precision to the concept of capital and hence class relations. The logic of derivatives involves deconstructing 'things' into a spectrum of tradable risks. The article identifies the ways in which this logic is spreading into an increasing range of social, …
Risk and Value
The process of financialization of accumulation brings to the fore the issue of risk and risk trading. This article explores the way finance and risk relate to capital accumulation and how risk might be integrated into Marxian value theory. It looks first at what it would mean to incorporate risk into conventional measurements of value and then opens up alternative ways of thinking about the process of production, to recognize frontier developmen…
Politics, time and space in the era of shadow banking
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, there has been an understandable focus on the financial fragility and contagion aspects of shadow banking. This article argues that shadow banking is important for another set of reasons. It has been well established that shadow banking permits the transformation of assets and financial claims. It has also been established that fiscal and regulatory arbitrage occurs through shadow banking, and associate…
The unaccountable risks of Libor
One of the on-going consequences of recent financial crises seems to be that the conventional 'anchor' measures of global finance (such as the US dollar, treasury bonds and AAA rated securities) are no longer playing the anchoring role once believed of them. LIBOR now needs to be added to this list and not just because it has been tarnished by illegal practices, but because it is looking increasingly surpassed by financial market practices. LIBOR…
Economics (25 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Finance (14 works) · Economic Theory and Policy (13 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (11 works) · Neoclassical economics (10 works) · Financial crisis (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Business (7 works)