Struggling over new asset geographies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Assetization and the 'new asset geographies'
Dialogues in Human Geography, 2023
An asset is both a resource and property, in that it generates income streams with its sale price based on the capitalization of those revenues. Although an asset's income streams can be financially sliced up, aggregated, and speculated upon across highly diverse geographies, there still has to be something underpinning these financial operations. Something has to generate the income that a political economic actor can lay claim to through a property or other right, entailing a process of enclosure, rent extraction, property formation, and capitalization. Geographers and other social scientists are producing a growing literature illustrating the range of new (and old) asset classes created by capitalists in their search for revenue streams, for which we argue assetization is a necessary concept to focus on the moment of enclosure and rent extraction. It is a pressing task for human geographers to unpack the diverse and contingent 'asset geographies' entailed in this assetization process. As a middle range concept and empirical problematic, we argue that assetization is an important focal point for wider debates in human geography by focusing attention on the moment of enclosure, rent extraction, and material remaking of society which the making of a financial asset implies.
So what is assetization? Filling some theoretical gaps
Dialogues in Human Geography
Birch and Ward (2022) propose the concept of assetization to frame a research agenda in Human Geography. This interesting proposal suffers from a rather imprecise definition of what an asset is, and that is a gap I intend to fill. I argue that assetization, for Birch and Ward, does not concern every type of asset, but only what can be described as ‘financialized assets’, including financial as well as intangible assets. I underline what financialized financial and intangible assets have in common and how that makes them relevant for analyzing contemporary capitalism. More precise specification of the assets created by Birch and Ward's assetization process clarifies the concept's true potential contribution.
Assets and assetization in financialized capitalism
Review of International Political Economy, 2020
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-09, political economists have typically identified and interrogated speculative logics and credit-debt relations as the markers of financialized capitalism. This paper argues that assets, and the contingent processes which turn all manner of things into assets (i.e. 'assetization'), can also be usefully foregrounded to understand the character and movement of financialized capitalism in the contemporary conjuncture, particularly in its Anglo-American heartlands. Centred on assets and assetization, research is refocused on the constitution of political economies of rent and investment, especially as the frontiers of financialized capitalism are extended to further incorporate nature and society. Research into financialized capitalism is also connected more explicitly to wider political debates over intensified inequalities, as the production and distribution of assets is key to wealth disparities and shapes fundamental stratifications across society.
This entry explains the rising popularity of the concept of financialization, despite it being considered a vague and chaotic concept. It also summarizes the wide-ranging multidisciplinary literature on financialization and makes a distinction between seven dimensions, or elements, of financialization, upon which a new definition of financialization is put forward that suggests that the power of the financialization literature lies in how it tries to understand the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states, and households. In discussing the different elements of financialization, the entry focuses on the financialization of the economy, nonfinancial firms, the state and households, but also on the processes of banking disintermediation and assetization. Finally, some avenues for future research are suggested. Keywords: assets, contemporary capitalism, corporate financialization, economic geography, financial geography, financial markets, global financial crisis, housing, globalization, lobbying, neoliberalism, political economy, real estate, state Definition of financialization: the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households.
Common problems or different questions: A critique of 'assetisation'
Dialogues in Human Geography , 2023
This commentary provides the contours of a Marxian critique of 'assetisation'. In doing so, the paper identifies a subjective approach to valuation and value which ties together Birch's and Ward's appeal to theoretical pluralism. The argument highlights how a focus on future-orientated valuation practices elide the question of class and production and, therefore, the very basis of rent and value. A call is made for geographers to better interrogate the relationship between rent and interest in the flurry of research around rentiership.
Human Studies, 2014
ABSTRACT This article shows that forms of analysis and calculation specific to finance are spreading, and changing valuation processes in various social settings. This perspective is used to contribute to the study of the recent transformations of capitalism, as financialisation is usually seen as marking the past three decades. After defining what is meant by “financialised valuation,” different examples are discussed. Recent developments concerning the valuation of assets in accounting standards and credit risk in banking regulations are used to suggest that colonisation of financial activities by financialised valuations is taking place. Other changes, concerning the valuation of social or cultural activities and environmental issues are also highlighted in order to support the hypothesis of a parallel colonisation of non-financial activities by financialised valuations. Specifically, the language of finance appears to gradually being incorporated into public policies, especially in Europe—and this trend seems to have gathered pace since the 2000s. Some interpretations are proposed to understand why public policies are seemingly increasingly reliant on financialised valuations.
THE VALUE OF FINANCIALIZATION AND THE FINANCIALIZATION OF VALUE
BC: Among the most forceful and compelling of the various arguments for the value of the concept of financialization is the thesis that in recent decades, capitalism has changed, and that the financialization concept helpfully captures one of the most significant vectors of this transformation. I am thinking in particular here of the types of definition of financialization offered by Greta , Till van Treeck (2009) and Costas Lapavitsas , where financialization is understood fundamentally in terms of a shift in the weighting of the capitalist economy toward financial forms of revenue and profit, whether or not those happen to be realized by the financial sector per se. It is striking, however, that some of the most forthright champions of the idea that capitalism has changed in this waythat it has, in a word, been financializednonetheless cling to an essentially unchanged (Marxian) understanding of value. 1 Lapavitsas, in my view, is one such; John Bellamy Foster (2008) is clearly another. For these scholars, following Marx, there are essentially two types of labour under capitalism. There is productive labour, which produces value, and thus wealth; and there is unproductive labour, which does not. And the finance sector and the labour embodied within it are, in this schema, fundamentally unproductive. Hence Lapavitsas' claim, as per the title of his book (Lapavitsas 2013), that financeand financializationentails profiting without producing (value), or in other words profiting by extracting value that is exclusively produced elsewhere in the economy. But isn't this contradictory, or, at the very least, paradoxical? Is it in fact credible that capitalism has been financialized, while capitalist valuecapitalism's sine qua nonhas not?
The Potential for Financialization
The financialization literature tries to make sense of how the world has been changing and continues to do so. There is real potential for financialization to conjoin real-world processes and practices that are conceptually treated as discrete entities. Financialization is an inherently spatial phenomenon that should be much more central to economic-geographic analysis, explaining how the financialization of the global economy is tied to financialization at other scales as well as to the financialization of the state, economic sectors, individual firms and daily-life.