Appel à communications : What is an exchange ? SASE annual conference

What Is an Exchange? The Crumbling of One Foundation of Modern Capitalism
Mini-conference, Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Annual Conference,
July 10-12, 2014, Chicago.
(https://sase.org/mini-conferences/themes_fr_182.html#MC8)
Braudel considered the stock exchange to be a shortcut for the merchants' world.
There took place power struggles to organize the mobilization of capital: financing
states and enterprises; controlling means of production; reaping the profits of
intermediation; and, eventually, speculating. Exchanges have long functioned as
local monopolies, which generally constituted hybrid extensions of the public
authority and of business interests, in order to organize the circulation of
capital in a given territory. The organizational features of exchanges varied
across time and location, but they all aimed at making instruments tradable
and operations reliable, and, in fine, they defined a space for self-regulatory
organization and informal coordination among financiers, who were part of the
national elites and in relations to other international financial centres.
Exchanges were flagship institutions (like national anthem, armies, universities?)
of nation-states' sovereignty.
Recently, the demutualization and listing of exchanges, combined with the rise of
alternative trading venues, overhauled this institutional foundation of Western
capitalism. From the 1980s, stock and derivatives exchanges gradually became
limited companies. Then, at the start of the 21stcentury, many of them went
public and even listed themselves on the markets they operate. They started
to enter into mergers with other exchanges thus weakening their connection to
national sovereignty and blurring their relations to local economy. At the same
time, less-regulated trading venues, often backed by internationally-operating
financial institutions, were allowed to directly compete with exchanges. The banks
themselves put in place in-house systems to internalize the orders of their
clientele or offer their best clients privileged access to restricted pools of
liquidity. Such a trend towards private transactions on privatised
trading venues culminated in the mid-Noughties, when the US Regulation NMS and
the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive were both promulgated.
Consequently, stock exchanges officially morphed from hybrid-institutions
organizing public competition between financial intermediaries into private
companies competing with one another and with their main users to provide
intermediation services. This overhaul of stock exchanges forces to tackle the
following questions, which all echo this broader paradox: the financialization
of modern capitalism has profoundly weakened one of its crucial institutions.

  *   What are the common features of stock exchanges, beyond variations in time and
locations? In what ways is an exchange different from a financial market, a trading
venue?
  *   Under which conditions may an exchange contribute to the financing of states,
local governments, firms and small and medium-sized enterprises?
  *   How come the setting-up of exchanges is still promoted to solve policy issues
(i.a. Obamacare Health Insurance Exchanges, exchanges for greenhouse gas allowances)
whereas their model has been seriously impaired in the financial world?
  *   What does the institutional crumbling of stock exchanges tell us about
the contemporary transformations of modern capitalism?
The organizers are looking for contributions that will explore the economic history
of exchanges, the political economy of their emergence, past and recent changes
and the study of their organizations. In short, contributions which would enlarge
our understanding of these typical and yet crumbling institutions of modern capitalism.
Submissions: https://sase.org/about-sase/conference-submission-and-award-guidelines_fr_25.html

Organizers: Marie-Laure Djelic, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Angelo Riva, and Matthias Thiemann

stephaniebarral

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