New Political Economy

Kollar, Justin

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2683974pmid: N/A

The so-called AI boom is part of an infrastructure-led industrial strategy, converting speculative computing demand into bankable fossil generation, transmission expansion, and water- and land-intensive industrial sites. This article bridges digital infrastructure studies and the new state capitalism literature by theorising compute as a socially produced resource whose availability depends on territorial governance. I argue that the buildout is being assembled through a fossil–AI nexus, a fossil–finance–platform coalition that produces powered land: an emergent asset form whose value derives from positionality in a constrained energy system that secures deliverable ‘firm’ power through revenue guarantees, deliverability rights, and cost-allocation arrangements. Drawing on a review of major gas-to-data centre co-location projects and a comparative analysis of PJM and ERCOT, I identify three recurring de-risking channels that convert uncertain load forecasts into durable, carbon-intensive infrastructure: revenue certainty, delivery certainty, and cost shifting. I show how ‘reliability,’ alongside security and competitiveness framings, compresses timelines, translates engineering criteria into bankability, and narrows public contestation. I also show how opacity, or ‘blackboxing,’ stabilises powered land by restricting access to contractual and cost-allocation terms, while relocating politics to transparency disputes and siting conflicts over where data centres go and who pays for the buildout.

Cooper, Melinda

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2685188pmid: N/A

Recent US election cycles have revealed a startling bifurcation in the political allegiances of finance capitalism. The current configuration of alliances places one faction of finance capital, consisting of private equity, hedge funds and venture capital, firmly on the side of the Trumpian GOP, while the other faction, extending to mutual and index fund managers, has become increasingly dependent on the Democrats' policy agenda. By tracing the evolution of New Deal securities law in the 1980s and beyond, this article seeks to explain how this organisational and factional divide fell into place and what it tells us about the evolving commitments of Democrats and Republicans respectively.

Sahasrabuddhe, Aditi

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2680052pmid: N/A

Since 2009, the People’s Bank of China has created an expanding network of currency swaps around the world to facilitate renminbi internationalisation (RMBI). These lines present an attractive dollar alternative for many emerging and developing economies. (EMDEs) Despite these developments, I argue that while China's swap lines may play an important window-dressing role and may enable dollar access, the terms and operation of the RMB swap lines themselves constrain broader currency use by EMDEs. China’s currency swaps reflect and transmit, previously studied economic, political, and geopolitical impediments to RMBI. They provide RMB liquidity that is contingent and restricted, thereby undermining usability and consequently, their capacity to support sustained international RMB use in global financial markets. Drawing on qualitative evidence from elite interviews I evaluate my argument with three case studies on Indonesia, Argentina and Sri Lanka. My analyses illustrate the limits of China’s monetary expansion in the global South.

Rogers, Chris

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2681089pmid: N/A

A broad literature on asset-based welfare has emphasised the centrality of systems of housing finance to macroeconomic policy regimes, and their reliance on both financialisation and popular support for owner occupation. This paper draws on documents from The National Archives to argue that the origins of asset-based welfare in the UK can be understood as part of a cascade of unintended consequences initiated by attempts to mediate a tension between owner occupation and counter-inflation strategy that emerged in the early 1970s. It shows how government support for mortgage market liquidity to ease affordability contributed to house price increases, which then further undermined affordability and in turn focused attention on means of catalysing further mortgage market innovations and affordable housing schemes, such as shared ownership. The paper shows how, as the affordability context has shifted, such schemes have not straightforwardly widened the benefits of asset-ownership as intended, but in many cases established forms of precarious owner occupation.

Doose, Hanna

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2685194pmid: N/A

While there is much research examining assets that drive or are threatened by climate change, this paper highlights the dynamics surrounding a third type, climate-mitigating assets, which help alleviate climate change and may thus increase in value. I argue that these assets warrant closer attention, as meanings attached to them underpin distinct forms of power for different owners and interact with states’ climate mitigation strategies. Land can be a key mitigation asset, crucial for carbon sequestration and biodiversity. Examining Scotland’s land use-based mitigation strategy as an extreme case, the paper shows how concentrated private ownership and diverging land use interests generate governance challenges and intensify power struggles over assets. Established landowners gain control-based power from owning assets that are in high demand due to climate change. At the same time, Scotland’s reliance on private finance has drawn financial actors into the land market, whose capital mobility further expands their power related to climate-mitigating assets and who focus on competitive returns above all else, exposing mitigation efforts to market volatility. Adopting an asset-centred perspective, the paper conceptualises climate-mitigating assets, highlighting the renewed importance of control-based power, and proposes hypotheses on how different owners derive distinct power from the same asset.

Amiotte Suchet, Alex

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2683978pmid: N/A

Contemporary economic policies have become increasingly reliant on lending and guarantee instruments managed by public banks. Does this trend signal a return of the state, or rather the financialisation of public action? This article explores the long-term institutional transformations of public SME financing in France, analysing the evolving roles of finance, businesses and the state. Drawing on historical institutionalism and the political economy of financialisation, it examines both the creation and the gradual financialisation of the institutional arrangement governing public SME financing. Based on extensive sources – 108 archive boxes, additional historical materials, and ten semi-structured interviews – the study traces the emergence of a financialised institutional arrangement that has underpinned French economic policy since the late 1990s. Initially centred on public guarantees developed in the interwar period, the introduction of public loans in the 1980s produced a fragile arrangement that ultimately facilitated financialisation through the integration of financial devices and actors. This periodisation based on valuation powers helps to explain the recent conjunction of renewed public intervention and the consolidation of financialisation dynamics.

Beck, Mareike

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2685197pmid: N/A

Asset logics are at the centre of contemporary capitalism, class formation and inequality. This paper addresses the gender dimensions of the impact of the asset economy. Wealth studies have demonstrated the severity of contemporary wealth concentration, including the gender asset gap. However, the focus on asset ownership has obscured important gendered logics. Building on but extending the Minskian household, I analyse the everyday asset struggles of UK households. Using the UK Wealth and Asset Survey, I contextualise household balance sheets in two steps. I firstly situate household assets within recent asset inflating dynamics to show the gendered impact of rising asset values. The second step reflects on the high volume of debt across all UK households. I propose the concept of debt work to foreground the politics of how household assets are produced, used, maintained and sustained. This presents household social reproductive strategies as a key dimension of asset-based inequality as all household assets require significant levels of debt. These debts entail financial, cognitive and affective burdens and depleting effects that are experienced unevenly along gender and class lines. The analysis calls for a closer integration of everyday debt work into studies of how asset struggles are reconfiguring class and social stratification.

Fitzsimons, Alejandro L.; Starosta, Guido

doi: 10.1080/13563467.2026.2676613pmid: N/A

This article examines the dynamics of industrial restructuring in the contemporary automotive GVC based on the Marxian critique of political economy. To do so, it firstly sketches out the main tenets of the theoretical approach, which, in a nutshell, establish how the system-wide ‘laws of production and appropriation of value’ become mediated through a stratified qualitative differentiation of individual capitals (i.e. firms) and a concomitant quantitative hierarchy of profitability. Subsequently, it examines through those lenses the recent trajectory of the automotive GVC, which is shown to revolve around the changing relationship between automakers and so-called ‘mega suppliers’ resulting from the twofold process of, on the one hand, vertical disintegration by means of outsourcing of the manufacturing of parts and components and, on the other, the growing concentration and centralisation of capital among first-tier suppliers. On these grounds, the article finally moves to its second focal point and key contribution, namely: the discussion of a methodologically-informed framework for the construction of quantitative metrics of profitability, which are then used to provide an analysis of profitability differentials between automakers and suppliers based on data obtained from the balance sheets of firms.