Scott James
Reader in Political Economy, King’s College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/people/dr-scott-james
IPE of finance and tech, monetary politics, City of London
BANK POLITICS (OUP, 2023)
global.oup.com/academic/product/ba…
- Vibes
- Reposted by Scott JamesApplications are open for the Finance Summer School 2026. Last two have been at Brown. This one is at LSE thanks to LSE European Institute and Huth Initiative, plus the Berkeley Program on Finance and Democracy. Stellar Line up. Apps open: forms.gle/WsEVk4Yy52Dn...
- Huge if true
- Dedollarization or Redollarization? with Jeff Frieden, Rogoff et al www.youtube.com/live/M6vebFZ...
- Our stablecoins, your problem
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- History doesn’t repeat or rhyme, it just tortures us
- The more cynically minded might view Trump’s reluctant reconciliation with dollar stability - backtracking on Mar a Lago, appointing Warsh, etc - as creating monetary space for greater geopolitical adventurism in 2026
- A transition not a rupture
- So we started Trump’s ‘Janarchy’ with Maduro, detoured via Greenland and Davos, and end with Kevin Warsh Agency meets structure, a love story
- Capital called, it wants the Fed back
- Narratives of dollar declinism also underestimate the probability that dominance actually strengthens: not because the US suddenly rediscovers functional politics but scale of geoeconomic risks facing Europe (far right, Russia) and China (debt mountain, energy constraints)
- An element of trying to reinvent the wheel here when theories of instrumental power / power of inaction vs structural power of markets still does a pretty good job
- Looking to crowdsource some ideas / comments. Thinking about why the US has not pursued a CBDC - aside from domestic political opposition - and the extent to which this reflects a structural logic of full spectrum global dollar dominance. 1/n 🧵
- Reposted by Scott James‘The more that other countries look to escape US financial coercion, the more the US will scale it up… The global dollar system may now be a source of instability rather than stability.’ Our new paper by @dsquareddigest.bsky.social & @himself.bsky.social www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/60...
- Expanding e-CNY usage a feature of the sequencing & acceleration of digital innovation driven by global monetary competition If interest-bearing CBDCs spread from China to Europe, expect yield-bearing $ stablecoins to follow close behind
- Theory #3. Davos has proven its worth this week as 1) an on-and-off ramp for MAGA to interface with transnational club governance, and 2) a political antenna for separating the signal from the noise, creating space for TACO
- China’s quiet launch of an interest-bearing CBDC this month could be far more consequential for the future of the dollar and international monetary system than any of Trump’s shenanigans this week Over to you, Brussels? www.forbes.com/sites/digita...
- Part of the challenge for Davos is that Trump and MAGA insist on treating these global fora as an extension of zero-sum domestic politics rather than self-contained world of technocratic transnationalism
- Interesting test of whether and how the WEF can be adapted and repurposed for an era of de-institutionalised / non-rule based global governance defined by interpersonal networks, transnational cliques, patronage and ad hoc deal making www.politico.eu/article/davo...
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- 💯 Essential to ensure that analysis of European security / defence / strategic autonomy is fully grounded in the financial and monetary world of full spectrum dollar dominance, Fed swap lines and interlocking balance sheets
- Interesting test of whether and how the WEF can be adapted and repurposed for an era of de-institutionalised / non-rule based global governance defined by interpersonal networks, transnational cliques, patronage and ad hoc deal making www.politico.eu/article/davo...
- Structural realists
- Donald Trump tied his claims on Greenland to not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in a letter to Norway's prime minister obtained by Bloomberg News. Full story: bloom.bg/3LPd10i 📷: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
- This week’s Davos as the maginot line for the international financial system time.com/7345627/trum...
- ‘Let’s just see how bond markets respond on Monday’ is not much of an international order
- Discovered that JK Galbraith’s 13-part Age of Uncertainty (1977) is currently on iplayer www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
- ‘Waiting for a call from Nigel Farage’ sums up 15+ years of British politics
- 🧐
- Important test of all those theories of CBI we’ve spent 20+ years teaching. Or rather how much financial markets believe CBI actually matters for controlling inflation vs believing it was always more to do with signalling, party management, blame avoidance, etc
- Is a Trump-compliant Fed more likely to grant systemically-important stablecoin issuers a Fed master account? (Not asking for a friend.)
- Hypothesis. Trump’s attack on the Fed is a morbid symptom of the structural breakdown of the 25yo coalition of bank-led interests which prioritised price stability and CBI, challenged by rise of alt-asset management + fintech + AI which prefers asset inflation / arbitrage
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- 👀
- This will be a real test of American exceptionalism in global finance. Treasury markets will have a tolerance threshold which won’t be the next Fed chair, but it might be weaponising swap lines against Europe
- If you think he's going to play nicely in markets/finance then I love that for you. Adorable. My thing this weekend: What is to stop Trump upending the rules in global finance too? - as.ft.com/r/53e52459-8...
