Catherine Walsh
Financialization and the UK State, 1976-2012
After a decades-long displacement of profit-making in the real-economy by profit-making in financial markets, I ask what the state’s discursive role has been in enrolling citizens and real-economy businesses in this process. Most academic scholarship regarding financialization has focused on financial markets, boardrooms, and the forces of globalization, but less attention has been paid to the role of the sovereign state as a mediator, arbiter, and enroller for real-economy actors, including citizens. Through taxation, regulation, monetary policy, public-service provision, and its own involvement in market trading, the state encourages both real-economy businesses and individuals to favour particular economic behaviours over alternate choices. These mundane state functions combine with more obvious rhetorical devices of political communication to build and broadcast an elite discourse about what economic activities and situations are possible, viable, desirable, fair, destructive, or frightening.
For the first year of this project I am conducting a discourse analysis of parliamentary budget statements delivered since 1976, and supporting my qualitative research with more quantitative, computer-based, corpus-linguistic techniques. These primary sources are illustrating the state's active enrolment of citizens and real-economy businesses into financial markets in a host of ways, as well as the state's encouragement of actors to remain so invested over time. This evidence shows state elites actively creating and perpetuating a discourse for financialization, in other words for the benefit those who accumulate capital and extract rents and fees from financial markets. I argue that the UK state discourse has actively encouraged the movement of capital created by labour, production, and trade into financial markets, where as investment and collateral they become subject to different criteria of ownership, use, reward, and risk.
States around the world are presently encouraging citizens and businesses to accept losses generated in financial markets in the form of sovereign debt, despite the burden this places on public services, currencies, employment and real-economy growth. It is my hope that a better understanding of the UK state's discursive role in the history of financialization illuminates the present role of sovereign states in mediating financialization’s future economic and social effects on citizens and the real-economy.
My thesis supervisor is Professor Aeron Davis.
Research Interests
Marxist and neo-Marxist critiques; heterodox economics; elite discourse; finance capitalism and the state; taxation and wealth distribution; monetary policy; indebtedness; time and money;
Post-Secondary Degrees
M.A. (Religious Studies) 2004, Memorial University of Newfoundland (Thesis Title: Prophet in a Righteous Land: George W. Bush’s Rhetoric and the Hebrew Bible)
B.Ed. (Secondary Science and Mathematics) 1997, University of New Brunswick
B.Sc. (Chemistry) 1995, St. Francis Xavier University
Peer-reviewed Publications
Chichak, K., Walsh, M. C., and Branda, N. R. Axially coordinated porphyrins as new rotaxane stoppers.” Chemical Communications 10 (2000), 847–848.
Walsh, C., Ray, T.S., and Jan, N. Anomalous biennial oscillations in a Fisher Equation with a discretized Verhulst term.” Journal of Statistical Physics 81 (1995), 761–775.
Conference Presentations
“Freedom is God’s Gift to Humanity: How George W. Bush’s Religious Rhetoric Reconciled Political Identities” Fifth Media@LSE PhD Symposium, London School of Economics, 7 June 2011.
“An Internal Literary Analysis of I Kings 22.” School of Graduate Studies Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, Memorial University of Newfoundland, February, 2003
Contact
Please use my local user-alias, c.walsh, at the university’s domain, which is gold.ac.uk.