The Wall Street Consensus

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Venue
Paul Webley Wing (Senate House)
Room
SALT

About this event

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

CANCELLED

Daniela Gabor (UWE Bristol)

The WSC is an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around questions of ‘how to sell development finance to the market’. From the Billions to Trillions agenda to the World Bank’s new Maximising Finance for Development or the G20 Infrastructure as an Asset Class, it seeks to create investable opportunities in poor countries that can attract the trillions of global institutional investors and orient them to the SDG ambitions. It emerges as a strategic attempt by global (shadow) banks to harness the global financial crisis and the ongoing climate crisis for its own ends. Through its 10 commandments, the WSC seeks to re-orient financial systems towards market-based finance and to forge the de-risking state.

In the WSC world, the state derisks bond finance for global institutional investors confronted with an increasingly complex risk landscape: (i) demand risk in PPP user-fee (social) infrastructure, (ii) political risk that future progressive governments might nationalize commodified infrastructure or introduce policies that would threaten profits such as higher minimum wages or climate regulation, (iii) climate risks that may become part of regulatory frameworks as material credit risks and (iv) bond market (liquidity) risks that complicate foreign investors’ exit from SDG assets. The WSC narrows the scope for a green developmental state that could design a just transition to low-carbon economies, where the burden of structural change does not disproportionately fall on the poor.

Speaker Biography

Daniela Gabor is Professor of Macroeconomics and Finance at UWE Bristol. She studies money and international development in the age of financial globalisation. She tweets at @DanielaGabor

Organiser: Dr Elisa Van Waeyenberge

Contact email: ew23@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: 020 7898 4284