Many constitutions include provisions intended to limit the discretion of governments in economic policy. In times of financial crises, such provisions often come under pressure as a result of calls for exceptional responses to crisis situations. This volume assesses the ability of constitutional orders all over the world to cope with financial crises, and the demands for emergency powers that typically accompany them. Bringing together a variety of perspectives from legal scholars, economists, and political scientists, this volume traces the long-run implications of financial crises for constitutional order. In exploring the theoretical and practical problems raised by the constitutionalization of economic policy during times of severe crisis, this volume showcases an array of constitutional design options and the ways they channel governmental responses to emergency.

This book is the first to address the multi-faceted influence of the global financial crisis on the national constitutions of the countries most affected. By tracing the impact of the crisis on formal and informal constitutional change, sovereignty issues, fundamental rights protection, regulatory reforms, jurisprudence, the augmentation of executive power, and changes in the party system it addresses all areas of the current constitutional law dialogue and aims to become a reference book with regard to the interaction between financial crises and constitutions. The book includes contributions from prominent experts on Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the USA providing a critical analysis of the effects of the financial crisis on the constitution. The volume’s extensive comparative chapter pins down distinct constitutional reactions towards the financial crisis, building an explanatory theory that accounts for the different ways constitutions responded to the crisis. How and why constitutions formed their reactions in the face of the financial crisis unravels throughout the book.

"This book examines the 2008 global economic crisis as a complex social phenomenon or "social hieroglyphic", arguing that the crisis is not fundamentally economic, despite presenting itself as such. Instead, it is considered to be a symptom of a long-standing, multifaceted, and endemic crisis of capitalism which has effectively become permanent, leading contemporary capitalist societies into a state of social regression, manifest in new forms of barbarism. The author offers a qualitative understanding of the economic crisis as the perversion, or inversion, of the capitalistically organized social relations. The genesis of the current crisis is traced back to the unresolved world crisis surrounding the Great Depression in order to map the course and different "inverted forms" of the continuous global crisis of capitalism, and to reveal their inner connections as derivative of the same social constitution. From a historical and interdisciplinary perspective, the book expounds critical social theory, elaborating on the intersection between the early critical theory of the Frankfurt School - mainly Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse - and the "social form" analysis of the Open Marxism school. Global Economic Crisis as Social Hieroglyphic critically addresses the permanent character of the 1920s/30s crisis and the "crisis theory" debates; the political crisis in Eastern Europe (1953-68); the crisis of Keynesianism; the crisis of subversive reason; the crisis, negative anthropology and transformations of the bourgeois individual; the state of social regression and the destructive tendencies after the rise of neoliberalism; and finally, the 2008 financial crisis and its ongoing aftermath"--

In this original, provocative contribution to the debate over economic inequality, Ganesh Sitaraman argues that a strong and sizable middle class is a prerequisite for America’s constitutional system. A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable—and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America’s republic. Over the next two centuries, generations of Americans fought to sustain the economic preconditions for our constitutional system. But today, with economic and political inequality on the rise, Sitaraman says Americans face a choice: Will we accept rising economic inequality and risk oligarchy or will we rebuild the middle class and reclaim our republic? The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution is a tour de force of history, philosophy, law, and politics. It makes a compelling case that inequality is more than just a moral or economic problem; it threatens the very core of our constitutional system.

This volume presents the first thorough sociologically-informed legal analysis of the financial crisis which unfolded in 2008. It combines a multitude of theoretically informed analyses of the causes, dynamics and reactions to the crisis and contextualises these within the general structural transformations characterising contemporary society. It furthermore explores the constitutional implications of the crisis and suggests concrete changes to the constitutional set-up of contemporary society. Although the question of individual responsibility is of crucial importance, the central idea animating the volume is that the crisis cannot be reduced to a mere failure of risk perception and management for which individual and collective actors within and outside of financial organisations are responsible. The 2008 crisis should rather be understood as a symptom of far deeper structural transformations. For example contemporary society is characterised by massive accelerations in the speed with which societal processes are reproduced as well as radical expansions in the level of globalisation. These transformations have, however, been asymmetrical in nature insofar as the economic system has outpaced its legal and political counterparts. The future capability of legal and political systems to influence economic reproduction processes is therefore conditioned by equally radical transformations of their respective operational forms and self-understanding. Potentially the 2008 crisis, therefore, has far-reaching constitutional implications.

Contents: (1) Recent Developments and Analysis; (2) The Global Financial Crisis and U.S. Interests: Policy; Four Phases of the Global Financial Crisis; (3) New Challenges and Policy in Managing Financial Risk; (4) Origins, Contagion, and Risk; (5) Effects on Emerging Markets: Latin America; Russia and the Financial Crisis; (6) Effects on Europe and The European Response: The ¿European Framework for Action¿; The British Rescue Plan; Collapse of Iceland¿s Banking Sector; (7) Impact on Asia and the Asian Response: Asian Reserves and Their Impact; National Responses; (8) International Policy Issues: Bretton Woods II; G-20 Meetings; The International Monetary Fund; Changes in U.S. Reg¿s. and Regulatory Structure; (9) Legislation.

As economic advisor to the Bank of England for many years, C. A. E. Goodhart is uniquely positioned to assess the role of the central bank in the modern financial system. This book brings together twenty-one of his previously published articles dealing with the changing functions of central banks over time, recent efforts to maintain price stability, and debates over specific financial regulation proposals in the UK. Although the current day-to-day operations of central banks are subject to continuous comment and frequent criticism, their structural role within the economic system as a whole has generally been accepted without much question, despite several attempts by economists in recent decades to challenge the value of the institution. C. A. E. Goodhart brings his knowledge of both the theoretical arguments and the actual working of central banks to bear in these essays. Part I looks at the general purposes and functions of central banks within the financial system and their evolution over time. Part II concentrates on the current objectives and operations of central banks, and the maintenance of price stability in particular. Part III analyzes the broader issues of financial regulation.