While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. Some of us are investment managers who earn billions from our daily labors but are allowed to classify our income as “carried interest,” thereby getting a bargain 15 percent tax rate. Others own stock index futures for 10 minutes and have 60 percent of their gain taxed at 15 percent, as if they’d been long-term investors.

These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It’s nice to have friends in high places.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

Here.

Bain Partner Andrew Tymms said the continent’s financial services industry will continue to grow at a compound annual rate of 15 percent to 2020, outpacing gross domestic product growth.

“Retail banking will grow faster than corporate banking … to make up 38 percent of banking revenue by 2020, bringing in the previously unbanked population and shifting the experienced to sophisticated products,” Tymms said.

The study, “Financial Services in Africa: A Decade of Opportunities” reckons financial firms will make up 19 percent of Africa’s gross domestic product by 2020, compared with 11 percent in 2009.

H/T @AfricaResearch, whose blog you should check out.

2. Is Estonia boarding a sinking Titanic?

3. HSBC releases a report titled The World in 2050

4. Obama in Africa: To go or not to go?

5. “The scooter traffic [in Vietnam] more or less lives up to reputation.”

6. “In the past few centuries, what was once the European and then American periphery became the core of the world economy. Now, the economies that became the periphery are re-emerging as the core” – Martin Wolf.

Because European systems of finance, debt and credit went along with colonial governance and missionisation, they were often interpreted in terms of political authority (via, for example, the tax and tariff regimes of the bureaucratic state) and morality, ethics and religion (via, for example, the Abrahamic religions’ emphasis on divine judgement as an accounts-settling, or the prohibition of interest in Islam and debates over usury or ‘excessive’ interest in both Christianity and Judaism). In both the political and religious domains, colonial and post-colonial efforts to ‘teach’ finance as a means of (self-) development often rested on assumptions about time: teaching finance meant teaching self-restraint and the time-horizon of long-term investment, the amortisation of debts and the future benefit of savings…. In the nineteenth century, people accustomed to systems of obligation to chiefly nobles found themselves hard pressed to understand why the repayment of monetary debts would be in their best interest: wealth in people and wealth and cash were hard to reconcile, leading colonial merchants and traders to complain that ‘you have to give credit to the Blacks here and they pay late or never’ or ‘The greatest caution is requisite in giving credit to the natives … [because] once [you] allow them to exceed a certain sum … they cease to pay anything further’…. It is a small step from this colonial raciology of debt to twentieth-century development discourse and its depictions of people as poor because they cannot manage money, do not possess an entrepreneurial spirit, or are incapable of the abstract thought that finance seemingly requires…. Hence, the World Bank reports that unsophisticated lenders in some ‘transitioning’ or ‘developing’ economies are reluctant to accept certain kinds of collateral from potential borrowers, specifically movable property held by the prospective borrower such as factory machinery or inventories. ‘Rather’, the Bank writes, ‘lenders require that the moveable property be placed under their direct control – as if they were valuables in a bank vault or goods in a bonded warehouse’…. The Bank then asks, incredulously, ‘Why is real estate or merchandise in a vault acceptable as collateral, but not livestock, machinery, and inventories?’ …. The Bank thus proposes the development of legal regimes that permit the ‘creation of security interests for any person over any thing’ ….

In Maurer, B., 2005. Finance. In J. Carrier, ed. A Handbook of Economic Anthropology.  Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, pp. 179&180.

The 14th Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality conducted by the Irmgard Coninx Foundation, the Social Science Research Centre Berlin and Humboldt-University Berlin, 25 – 29 June 2011

Topic

The recent financial crisis has once more revealed the power financial markets hold over everyday life. The financial and especially the credit and loan system has lost its reputation as a driving force for economic growth. It now increasingly stands for the ongoing dispossession of the middle classes and even more of already vulnerable populations. From a broader perspective, however, this is only one aspect of the ongoing financialization. In fact, many have argued that financialization has given the average citizen unprecedented power over corporations through political consumerism and shareholder activism. And corporations respond to these new demands through large CSR programs and codes of conduct.

The 14th Berlin Roundtables seeks to address the financialization beyond a narrow economic framework as a social, political and cultural process in the advanced industrial countries, as well as in transitional societies and developing countries and at a variety of levels – local, national, and regional. The conference will be divided into two workshops:

Workshop I ‘Deconstructing Credit and Money in Neoliberalism: Power, Culture, and History’ chaired by Jane Guyer (Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University) and Susanne Soederberg (Global Development & Political Studies, Queen’s University, Canada) and

Workshop II ‘Financialization and Corporate Social Responsibility: Consumers and Investors as the New Policymakers?’ chaired by Boris Holzer (Sociology, University of Bielefeld) and Bryane Michael (Economics, Stockholm School of Economics)

For further information, please see the Background Paper.

Based on an international essay competition, approximately 30 applicants will be invited to discuss their research and practical ideas with prominent scholars at one of Europe’s leading research institutions. The Roundtables will be accompanied by evening lectures.

Application Procedure

The call for papers extends to scholars (max. up to 5 years after Ph.D.) and practitioners. Please submit your paper (maximum 3500 words including footnotes and bibliography), an abstract (max. 300 words), a narrative biography and a CV using the online submission form on the Foundation’s website. Submission deadline is 27 March 2011. Please note that co-authorship and already published papers will not be accepted.

The workshop will be held at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZW) 25 – 29 June 2011. Travel and accommodation expenses for participants will be covered by the Irmgard Coninx Foundation. All participants are expected to actively participate during the full three days of this workshop.

Irmgard Coninx Research Grant

After the conference, a jury will award up to two three-month fellowships among the workshop participants to be used for research and academic networking in Berlin at the WZB. The grant includes a monthly stipend of 1,000 Euro plus accommodation in Berlin.

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Check out this FT video report on what investors think of the current state of Nigeria’s financial sector.

The reform of the financial sector has been targeted mainly at the banking sector, with the federal government’s decision to buy non-performing loans off the balance sheet of troubled banks.

Some people, including the interviewee in the FT report, think that it should have extended to the insurance sector. I think the main problem is with the regulation of the financial sector in general. The DG of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ms Arunma Oteh,  has been trying her best to sanitise a stock exchange that went wild. It seems that things are gradually settling down at the NSE, but unless things are sufficiently stable investors are going to be wary, and rightfully so.

Delivered at Gresham College, London. The summary:

Professor Niall Ferguson offers an evolutionary approach to financial history. He questions the impeding of ‘natural selection’ by keeping the financial dinosaurs alive through the life support of monetary injections: “without creative destruction, our economic system cannot be a healthy one.”

The view that financial history could be ‘evolutionary’ in fact pre-dates Darwin, born 200 years ago this year, but the view has been pushed into the hinterlands of contemporary thinking about the worlds of finance and economics. Through the publication of his book, The Ascent of Money, Professor Niall Ferguson brought about a timely re-emergence of the evolutionary approach.

By looking at finance along evolutionary lines, we can relate the long run of financial history to recent events and so illuminate them in a way which will perhaps offer us a clearer sight of how we should pull ourselves out of the current economic crisis.

Click the watch full progamme button on the video to watch the full lecture.