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Value models: Finance, risk, and political economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Brett Christophers
Brett Christophers*
Affiliation:
Uppsala University, Sweden
*
Corresponding author: Brett Christophers, Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Box 513, 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden. Email: brett.christophers@kultgeog.uu.se
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Abstract

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This article develops a basic typological framework for understanding and analyzing financial risk from a political economy perspective. It is motivated by growing awareness of the contemporary significance of financial risk and by the fact that the political-economic literature on such risk currently lacks a workable heuristic. The framework distinguishes between and fleshes out what I refer to as the principal ‘value models’ of finance: fees, gains, premia, and spreads. Its primary aim is to facilitate the identification and conceptualization of: (1) the different risk configurations characterizing the heterogeneous political economy of finance; and (2) the different ways in which key stakeholders — such as finance capital, non-financial capital, and labor — come to be enrolled in such configurations. It also aims to contribute to the wider project of demystifying not just financial risk in particular but modern finance more generally.

Keywords

Valuefinanceriskpolitical economycapitalismfinance capital
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , 2015 , pp. 1 - 22
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2015 The Author(s)

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