Book manuscripts in progress
Measuring the Invisible Economy: A History of Alternative Global Economy Indicators (1920-2020) (under contract with Cambridge University Press--Elements Series)
The global economy is commonly understood through indicators and accounting systems that incompletely capture the full scope of human and non-human economic life. Key sectors such as domestic labour, informal economies, and environmental impacts have been systematically excluded from the standard metrics of monetized exchanges. Yet, these activities have always been integral to the production, reproduction, extraction, and destruction of value throughout history. This Element presents an intellectual history of critiques and alternatives to global economic indicators from the interwar period to the present. It highlights the contributions of marginalized economic thinkers—statisticians, economists, sociologists, demographers, biologists, and physicists—who pioneered innovative ways to account for factors traditionally omitted from economic metrics. By centring these critiques, this Element enriches the history of economic thought with authors and ideas seldom discussed in the literature and explores how to better understand the past and present global economy through alternative perspectives that integrate both human and ecological dimensions.
The Dream of Infinite Money: Global Financial Deregulation and the October 1987 Crash
The Dream of Infinite Money tells the story of the birth of modern global finance and the dawn of the liberal dream through the stock market crash of October 19, 1987. This global event served as an acid test for the economic, legal, technological, social, and cultural changes that occurred in the financial world in the two decades following the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971. Beginning in the United States, the automation and deregulation of markets contributed to their increasing interconnectedness worldwide. Financial markets grew larger, moved faster, until they crashed in twenty-three countries in less than 48 hours.
The loss remains one of the most dramatic single-day market declines in history, remembered as “Black Monday” after the infamous “Black Thursday” of 1929. Triggered by a diplomatic breakdown between the United States, Japan, and the European Community, the crash spread to all major financial centers as computerized trading programs ran amok. It brought an end to the “Roaring Eighties” and the bubbling dream of mass capitalism. The growing participation of small investors, women, minorities and non-Western investors in the markets had indeed fueled the speculative bubble. Record lows were reached in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the United States, Mexico, and Malaysia. Most of the 23 countries hit by the meltdown had deregulated and automated their stock markets following in the footsteps of the United States. Everywhere, these legal and technological changes had huge sociological and cultural consequences on the recruitment of financiers. However, the memory of the 1987 crash faded within a generation because it did not provoke the feared depression associated with the 1929 precedent. Against the idea that the first global crash was either 1929 or 2008, depending on historiographical trends, I posit that the 1987 crash represents the first modern global crisis that presaged all subsequent financial crashes—a pivotal event deserving comprehensive study for its prescient indications of subsequent financial downturns.
The first chapter begins with New York traders waking up to the news that Hong Kong had closed its markets overnight to stop the crash. Black Monday immerses the reader in the disillusions of aspiring millionaires throughout what might have been the most vivid day of their trading lives. The chapter follows the 48-hour panic around the globe from Hong Kong to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Johannesburg, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Mexico City, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, and Wellington. I wrote a minute-by-minute story of this global event, taking into account temporal jumps, flashbacks, misunderstandings, unequal room for maneuver, and the imagination of the actors.
The second part of the book describes the legal, political, geographic, and material background of the crash. It examines the genesis of financial liberalization and traces back through time and space to the original debates, power relations, and myriad pressures that destabilized and reshaped the financial landscape. Chapter 2 identifies the trigger of the crash as a geopolitical struggle between the United States, Germany, and Japan and demonstrates why we should consider Black Monday the first global crash of modern finance. It presents an alternative geography of finance in which multinational financial institutions lobbied markets, governments, and international organizations to facilitate their overseas expansion. Comparing countries that experienced the crash with those that did not, Chapter 3 focuses on market institutions and jurisdictions that were systematically reformed and reorganized, starting in the United States in the early 1970s. The automation of the markets followed the same chronology and overwhelmed urban spaces by turning cities into futuristic financial centers. Eventually, financial globalization homogenized economic development, business practices, and national legislations.
I explore the consequences of these transformations in the third part of the book. Chapter 4 focuses on the sociological impacts of legal reforms and technological restructuring of the stock exchanges. Often designated as a coherent whole in the public debate, the “world of finance” instead appeared riddled with deep gender, ethnic, and socio-economic tensions in a newly connected world system. Fierce competition arose among financial intermediaries to access markets and challenge trading monopolies. The confrontation of traditional heritages to new capitalist cultures gave birth to a fragmented world in which self-regulation could no longer apply. In such a conflictual cohabitation, I sketch the emerging sub-cultures and world visions through which the victims of the crash apprehended the event. As a dramatic consequence, Chapter 5 explores how new generations of financiers found legal inconsistencies in globalized markets and used them to their advantage in the name of anti-establishment and prosperity for all. I identified a network of free-riders who illegally profited from the merger and acquisition wave of the 1980s in the United States, and exploited and abused the tools multinational banks offered in the modern offshore capitalist archipelago. Their story sparked a decade of public controversies about the legitimacy of financial regulation, with artists like Andy Warhol involved in their defense. To conclude the book ends back to Wall Street. The afterword reflects on the legacy of the dream of mass financial capitalism and opens the discussion on democratic finance and globalization.
Articles under revision
‘Uncovering the Hidden Value of Unpaid Work: A Global History of Marginalized Metrics’ (with Maylis Avaro), R&R at Journal of Economic Methodology for a special issue on 'Diversity in Philosophy of Economics and Economic Methodology', eds. Catherine Herfeld, Magdalena Małecka, and Samuli Reijula.
Although economics derives its name from the Greek oikos nomos, or household management, the question of domestic labor, usually performed by women, has long been ignored in canonical conceptions of labor and value. But not by everyone. The canons of economic discipline have obscured the problem by systematically marginalizing the work of economists and activists who have sought to propose alternative methods of calculating the value of domestic work. This article proposes a comprehensive review of a century of research on the contribution of unpaid work to the global economy, and examines the mechanisms of exclusion of the value of unpaid work from GDP and national accounts. It highlights that the reluctance to reform these mainstream measures perpetuates well-known bias, despite generations of economists, especially women, consistently demonstrating the potential for improvement in accounting for diversity.
‘“Please Find Enclosed Restricted Information”: Businesses, International Organizations, and Economic Knowledge in Postwar European Reconstruction (1940-50s)’.
World War II destroyed not only European economic resources and infrastructure but also the institutional conditions for knowledge about material and financial assets. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), established in 1947, focused on collecting data on the state of national economies and the productivity of industrial facilities and disseminating standardized knowledge to coordinate public and private actors in reconstruction efforts, particularly in the steel industry. Steel was needed everywhere to rebuild cities, transportation, and factories, but not all governments were willing to share information about their resources with liberal international institutions. This article explores the informal origins of postwar international statistics through the networks and interrelations of industrialists collaborating with international organizations. The microhistory of correspondence between Spanish industrialist Don Luis Barreiro Zabala and UNECE officials from 1939 to 1953, during Franco’s dictatorship when Spain was not yet a member of the United Nations, provides a borderline case study to illustrate the informal and unstable nature of this collaboration, based on both reputation-based, business, and bureaucratic logics. Their covert correspondence sheds light on the role of businesspeople in the reconstruction process, the transition of economic knowledge to quantitative standardization, and the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) across the boundaries of democratic regimes.
'Kiyoshi Kojima in Latin America: Reimagining the World Economic System from the Pacific Rim', for a special issue on 'Visions of World Society beyond the West', ed. Marina Calculli.
Since World War II, international economic thinkers in Latin America have wavered between state-led and market-based models in search of a development path that would meet the region’s needs and capacities. Central to this endeavor was the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL in Spanish and Portuguese), a site for international economic thinking that, as early as the late 1940s, provided a counter-canon to the Western-dominated debate on global integration. It welcomed foreign perspectives and references, especially those from Japan, as the archipelago embarked on an alternative, successful road to development in the 1960s. This article focuses on the dissemination of the ideas of the Japanese economist Kiyoshi Kojima among Latin American economists and policymakers. It aims to show how this intellectual encounter gave CEPAL academic legitimacy and political weight as it sought to find a viable model for action in the context of sovereign debt crises and authoritarian regimes.
Book chapter in progress
‘The Petrostate Loophole: How European Carbon Markets Sustain Fossil Fuel Economies’, in Decarbonization and the Petrostate, ed. Alexander Etkind (CEU Press).
The European Emission Trading System (ETS), launched in 2005, was designed to reduce CO2 emissions across the European Union and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. Its inception followed decades of unsuccessful attempts to establish a common carbon tax during the 1980s and 1990s. Believing that financial markets could mediate the competing interests of diverse stakeholders—including coal producers, automotive industry lobbies, and environmental organizations—the European Commission turned to market-based solutions, drawing inspiration from U.S. debates, particularly those championed by Al Gore, on the financialization of environmental challenges. This chapter examines the historical and geopolitical contexts that shaped the ETS, focusing on how oil autocracies and the dual oil shocks of the 1970s influenced European energy policies. It further investigates whether the ETS was conceived as a strategic tool in a trade war with energy suppliers and how financial markets normalized and institutionalized the use of innovative carbon-trading instruments. By addressing these questions, the chapter offers an intellectual and geofinancial history of the ETS, situating its development within broader dynamics of decarbonization, global energy politics, and financial innovation.