Browsing by Subject "Debt"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt
    (2022-05) Renwick, Derk
    Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt is an academic dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment for a doctorate of philosophy degree. It applies Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics to neoliberal theory—particularly the classical liberal concepts of liberty and property as represented primarily by John Locke and Adam Smith—and uses this theoretical framework to analyze the current American student debt crisis. In the context of its historical precursors (classical dialectic, Hegelian dialectic, dialectical materialism) negative dialectics emerges as a tool that helps the subject recognize the existing hegemonic forces that influence any dialectic prior to its performance. It reveals the arbitrary nature of power structures—how they were built and can be undone—and the constellations that veil the power at play within them. When applied to neoliberalism, property, and debt, this method provides an approach to understanding the social, cultural, and economic influences that contribute to vast inequities observable in twenty-first century American society. The American student debt crisis is an example of an object of this inequity. Using original research from the University of Minnesota’s budget history, Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt confirms that certain correlations exist between state allocations, tuition, and student loans at the University of Minnesota, in particular, and surmises that this phenomenon exists between many, if not most, similarly organized academic institutions and their state sponsors. Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt further demonstrates how these correlations are often motivated by core neoliberal values that have risen to prominence in the politics, culture, and economics of mid-late twentieth and early twenty-first century American society. Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt includes a dramatic exposition of a theory of debt that captures its physical brutality and psychological abuse, and exposes the perverse power dynamic that underlies debt relationships. This dialectic of debt reveals a power at play that imposes the most heinous physical tortures, psychological torments, and perverse applications of power itself in order to maintain class antagonisms. Using historical theories of debt put forth by David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, this project reaches the ultimate conclusion that the shape of debt is rooted in a profound violence and desire to exert power and control over other human beings. This project further concludes that the shape of debt indicates one example of the ways in which human beings value capital and power over life and humanity itself. Last, Dialectic of Neoliberalism: The Shape of Debt introduces the concept of pathocentrism as a differentiated dialectic that illuminates hegemonic power dynamics by appealing to emotional discourses that reprioritize pathos in the context of typically logos-centered systems of power and discourse in Western society, culture, and economics. Pathos-centered discourses allow for the expressions of oppression to coexist alongside logically dominant discourses that attempt primarily to prove or disprove. The goal of pathocentrism is to eliminate anxiety on both sides of the dialectical equation by honoring the voices of the oppressed in public discourse.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Essays on macroeconomics
    (2013-07) Guo, Si
    The dissertation includes two essays. In the first essay I try to explain the slow recovery of the U.S. economy after the 2008-2009 recession. I develop a theory in which the slow recovery is due to continuing weak consumption demand arising from slowly resolved aggregate uncertainty. An exogenous belief shock creates uncertainty about firms' credit availability. This translates into income uncertainty at the household level because firms have to borrow from banks in order to hire workers. In response, household demand is low, which in turn causes firms to borrow little and produce little. This low level of economic activity impedes the resolution of uncertainty regarding credit availability. Therefore, the economy stagnates with high uncertainty, low demand, and low output, even though there is no shock to fundamentals. The resolution of uncertainty is not efficient because households do not fully internalize the effect of increasing their own demand on improving the quality of information. This leaves room for government intervention. Quantitatively my model generates a slow recovery, which is comparable to U.S. employment data. Model pre- dictions are also consistent with U.S. county level data: counties with cheaper access to household credit have higher employment but all counties recover at the same rate. In the second essay, which is co-authored with Yun Pei, we try to understand the impact of sovereign default on the lending countries. We develop a model in which banks in the lending countries can buy foreign sovereign bond, provide loan to domestic firms and borrow from domestic households. We find that a sovereign default in foreign countries can result in an output drop in the lending countries, because the default can worsen the balance sheet of banks. Therefore default risk in foreign countries can be transmitted to output risk in the lending countries. However, this does not mean that the governments in the lending countries should limit the purchase of foreign sovereign bond. A tax on the purchase of sovereign bond reduces the output fluctuation but also decreases the welfare of domestic bankers and households.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Essays on Sovereign Default with Information Frictions
    (2022-06) Fourakis, Stelios
    This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I build a flexible theoretical model of sovereign borrowing, default, and renegotiation with borrower reputation. There is asymmetric information about the government's ``type'', and reputation is the market belief that it is ``responsible'' and therefore less likely to default. Every government decision informs market beliefs about this ``type''. I calibrate the model using data on how countries' credit histories affect the prices they face. Using the model, I show that countries that have recently defaulted have poor reputations because they rapidly run up their debts prior to default, not because the default decision itself is revealing. I also show that, for countries facing non-trivial levels of default risk, the reputational costs of default are less than $0.2$ basis points of consumption. I then validate the model by showing that its predictions about the effects of borrowing behavior on interest rate spreads through the reputation channel are borne out in the data. Finally, I show that transparency initiatives and audit programs have significant, negative implications for welfare, because they weaken the signaling mechanisms that prevent, to some extent, overborrowing by the government. In the second chapter, I document that, during the height of the Eurozone Debt Crisis in Spain, 1.) Spanish government bonds became substantially less liquid and less traded on secondary markets, 2.) the first appearance of this phenomenon lagged far behind the initial jump in interest rate spreads in late 2008, and 3.) it persisted throughout the period of peak interest rate spreads and only subsided after the worst of the crisis had passed. I argue that these facts are related and best explained by a model of sovereign default that features secondary markets in which it is possible that some traders have private information. I then build a model in which some traders have private information about the country's future economic conditions and show that this allows the model to reproduce both the delayed reaction of bid-ask spreads as well as their peak and behavior during the height of the crisis. Using the model, I measure the losses to investors associated with variation in liquidity during debt crises. Finally, I validate the model by showing that the model's predicted relationship between current, realized bid-ask spreads and future values of GDP allows me to forecast GDP significantly better than a standard, benchmark forecast. In the third chapter, I document that, during the Eurozone Debt Crises, 1.) forecasts of output were persistently biased upwards, 2.) the afflicted countries all saw steep increases in their government debt to GDP ratios and their external government debt to GDP ratios, and 3.) spreads reacted slowly to these increases. I argue that these three facts are related and connect them through a model of sovereign default which features incomplete information with respect to the persistent component of output. I then show that the inclusion of information imperfections allows the model to produce patterns during and before crises which better match the patterns in the data than the benchmark model.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The riddle of the Commune: subjectivity and style in Karl Marx's The Civil War in France
    (2013-07) Bost, Matthew Wesley
    This project reads Karl Marx's The Civil War in France, a speech and pamphlet in which Marx treats the political experience of the Paris Commune. Reading the pamphlet through literature on rhetoric and aesthetics, I argue that Marx's speech performs a political style--a set of tropes which structure thought, political responses, and collective desires--that stands in productive tension with many of the ways his work has been taken up by scholars and activists alike. Over the course of my dissertation I highlight three key concepts in The Civil War in France--debt, history, and community--which, I argue, are both central to the speech's address of its own historical context and useful resources for those seeking to make Marx's work productive in the present. First, Marx highlights the degree to which punitive debt policies directed by the French government at France's poor and disenfranchised contributed to the violence of the Commune and its aftermath, while also asserting a "debt of gratitude" to the Commune that he argues should lead a diversity of French political constituencies to support it. Engaging with Andrew King's research on the rhetoric of power maintenance and with contemporary scholarship on the politics of debt, I argue that Marx's address responds to the propaganda leveled against the Commune by the French national government of the period, while also constituting a set of tropes that are useful for analyzing discussions of debt by regulators and activists in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Second, reading Marx's eulogy of the Commune's failure alongside his attempt to draw lessons from it for future political practice, I argue that The Civil War in France provides a compelling case study for scholars concerned with how "failed" social movements may become subject to a type of collective memory work that primes them to be rescued as impetuses for future political action. I argue that Marx develops a rhetoric of history that enables a productive rethinking of the current political moment in light of past revolutionary experiences. Finally, engaging with recent debates in rhetorical studies and in the critical humanities on the concept of community, I argue that Marx's speech proleptically critiques the politics of community that goes by the name of neoliberalism, and provides an alternative ethics of community, of which the Commune is a central example. Taken together, I show that these concepts provide a useful set of tools for thinking the economic and political crises attendant on current global capitalism.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item