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Like earlier crises, the Global Financial Crisis has triggered a restructuring of the international financial architecture. The G-20 was revived to provide a forum for the leaders of the world’s largest economies to agree on reforms intended to promote global economic and financial stability. The Financial Stability Forum was re-established with increased responsibilities and an extended membership as the Financial Stability Board. The IMF increased its efforts to assess the financial sectors of its members and of their compliance with financial standards and codes. Finally, in order to increase the IMF’s legitimacy and effectiveness, the IMF’s membership has undertaken the largest-ever overhaul of the IMF’s governance structure. This chapter takes a succinct look at the key aspects of these reform avenues and assesses whether the experience of the Global Financial Crisis has prompted states to substantially change the way they exercise their sovereign powers in monetary and financial matters.

The Global Financial Crisis, which began in 2007–8, was the most significant financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and acted as a large shock to British politics. The economic vote is usually thought about as a short-term mechanism: a reward or punishment for the incumbent depending on recent economic conditions. In this chapter we examine how this shock played a role in the outcome of the 2015 General Election, seven years after the crisis began. The Global Financial Crisis continued to affect voting behaviour in 2015 for two reasons: first, it did long-lasting damage to perceptions of Labour’s economic competence, and second, it created a political opportunity for the Conservatives to blame the previous Labour government for the aftermath of the financial crisis.

New York, the epicentre of the 2007–9 Global Financial Crisis, during the ensuing decade regained much of its pre-Crisis stature as a pre-eminent international financial centre. Its advantages going forwards include the huge US Treasury debt market, the dollar as the leading reserve currency, the Federal Reserve System as a de facto world central bank, a stronger US banking system, and the world’s largest securities markets which list and trade leading US-based companies and many corporations based in other countries. Congress’s 2010 Dodd–Frank Act reduced systemic financial risks, but also contained regulatory overkill that is gradually being modified; attempts to repeal or replace Dodd–Frank appear unlikely to succeed. Fintech represents both an opportunity—more efficient financial services—and a threat—reduced profits—for New York financial firms, which will most probably incorporate fintech innovations into their business models. For New York, Brexit is more of an opportunity than a threat.

This chapter discusses the movie Twelve Hours to Midnight— How Brazil Has Responded to the Global Financial Crisis, a documentary about how a country emerges from an economic crisis and ultimately redeems itself. Above all, it is the story of five men, Oded Grajew, Helio Mattar, Paulo Itacarambi, Ricardo Young, and Raymundo Magliano, who helped found the corporate social responsibility movement and later the Instituto Ethos in Brazil. It is a documentary about what happens to a country when it realizes it has hit “rock bottom” and has no choice but to face traditionally repressed realities and begin the long hard road to reforming itself. In short, it is where this conference should end, rather than begin, and I think it is also a fitting tribute to Hannah Arendt, the thinker whose ideas inform and inspire it.

As the former President of Bovespa, the Brazilian stock exchange, Raymundo Magliano Filho established model programs in corporate social responsibility that establish Brazil for how to imagine a capitalist economy without the excesses and crises that threaten capitalism around the world. Filho tells of the importance of Hannah Arendt in his own thinking. In his professional life, he says, he has been guided by Arendt's observation that power can never be a single individual’s property; rather, it lies at the basis of, and derives its legitimacy from, group action.

In the latter decades of the 20^th century, accompanied by burgeoning social movements and an unprecedented rise in commodity-desire across the global, the logic driving Marx’s revolutionary subject, the proletariat, was widely refuted. It introduced an anti-Marxist period that did not fully end until the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8. In 2018, Antonio Negri outlined a case for the continuing importance of Marxist analyses in relation to contemporary economic conditions, particularly Marxist materialism (concrete philosophy). The chapter is situated within this timeline. It outlines disputes between Marxist dogmatism (Negri’s term) and those philosophers who were searching for new ways to understand capitalism in hardening economic times, such as Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault and Negri, suggesting that it forced a split in progressive politics that persists today. [125]

This chapter covers the macroeconomic aspects of the Global Financial Crisis, the subsequent Great Recession/Lesser Depression and the policy responses in developed and developing countries. DESA was one of the first international bodies to recognize the impending threat of financial crisis and to advocate the use of Keynesian fiscal stimulus. In the aftermath of the crisis, the goal of most international institutions was to seek an early return to pre-crisis ‘normality’. This was reflected in a rapid turn towards fiscal consolidation, justified by the expectation that private sector expansion would offset public sector austerity. By contrast, WESP correctly warned of the dangers of a premature end to fiscal stimulus.

At the start of the twenty-first century, globalisation faces serious challenges. Since 9/11, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush, US unilateralism has undermined the rule of law, as the US withdrew or undermined a number of international treaties. The Bush Administration also blocked reform of the IMF and World Bank, preventing emerging powers like China to play a more prominent role in global governance. And finally, the universality embedded in the World Trade Organization is being challenged by major regional trade agreements. As a result, the global architecture is fraying with the rise of nationalism and regional blocs. Moreover, the public is losing confidence in globalisation as governments fail to strengthen the global financial system in the wake of the 2007/8 credit crunch, and cannot agree to a strong treaty to counter climate change.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework for systematic description and analysis of prime-ministerial leadership. It focuses particularly on the issue of the power of prime ministers. The author proposes that to understand that power and its successful deployment demands far more than an institutional analysis of prime ministers’ authority resources, it also requires an understanding of the personality (motives, world views, skills) and styles of individual office-holders, as well as a systematic analysis of how the (political, economic, cultural) context in which they operate shapes and constrains their power chances. The argument is illustrated by a comparative examination of the prime-ministerial leadership of Gordon Brown (United Kingdom), Stephen Harper (Canada), Kevin Rudd (Australia) and John Key (New Zealand) during the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s.

Cheap money is often said to be the origin of the global financial crisis. Others say that the crisis, like all economic crises, are just part of capitalism. But such an explanation, however true, risks normalizing the crisis and shies from affixing blame and making judgments. Building on Hannah Arendt's work, this introduction argues that the intellectual origins of the financial crisis lie in the elevation of economic over political thinking and the retreat of political thinking in the 20th century. The economic and scientific spirit of our age means that whatever can be done, should be done. Thus political judgment limiting action—economic, global, or scientific—is increasingly an anachronism.

This chapter explains how and why the Labour Party under Ed Miliband tried to use the global financial crisis as a trigger to recreate a social democratic moment. In order to do so, this chapter explains the political significance of the global financial crisis and how different political parties sought to use it for their own purposes ideological. Next, the chapter analyses the role of ideas in politics and explains the analytical framework that will be used to ascertain whether Ed Miliband was successful in his task of renewing social democracy. In particular, it will explain how discursive institutionalism and historical institutionalism offer appropriate heuristic devices to analyse the interplay between the ideas and the ideational, political and institutional constraints that informed and constrained the development of Labour’s political programme.