Session 1: Monetary sovereignty and the bond markets 

Monday, September 23, 2024

This seminar session revisits the issue of monetary sovereignty in the context of bond market pressure. As governments seek to decide autonomously upon fiscal policy, their room for manouever is somewhat constrained by the willingness of bond markets to absorb anticipated deficits, at least under the current institutional configuration of independent central banks. Somewhat less of a constraint at the center of the monetary system, said constraints operate much more forcefully in the semi-periphery (EU) and periphery.

This theme was prominent in the late 1990s and the 2000s political economy literature, focusing on the somewhat amorphous “bond market vigilantes” and their impact upon policy making (Mosley 2003). In the meantime, we have gained a much more refined understanding of the interactions of treasuries with rating agencies (Barta and Johnston 2023, Lemoine 2017, 2022), independent central banks (Pape and Rommelskirchen 2023) and institutional investors (Braun 2024), allowing for a more fine-grained analysis of said dynamics. This session is devoted to analyze how these actors’ predispositions and cognitive filters shape the degree of monetary sovereignty in terms of fiscal policy, linking governmental programs to the (global) monetary constitution.

The seminar series is led by the Money and Finance Idea Lab of the Columbia Center for Political Economy.

Commentators:

Zsofia Barta, Associate Professor of Comparative Public Policy, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, SUNY
Benjamin Lemoine, Researcher in Sociology, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales (IRISSO – université Paris-Dauphine)

Zoom Link:

https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/94309605855?pwd=DY14DecHfnbhWhn0A3mpxxJc5gOwaJ.1&from=addon