The Market And The State

Absent evidence to the contrary, it is usually assumed that US financial markets developed in spite of government attempts to regulate, and therefore laissez faire is the best approach for developing critically important and enduring market institutions. This book makes heavy use of extensive archival sources that are no longer publicly available to describe in detail the discussions inside the CBOT and the often private and confidential negotiations between industry leaders and government officials.

“A brilliant contribution to present-day discussions on Marx’s value theory, money, capital and finance, highlighting the cardinal regulatory role of the financial sphere in capitalism. Achim Szepanski, following Marx’s analyses, takes finance seriously. He shows that ‘financialization’ is not a deviation from some ‘good’ industrial capitalism, or a new, ‘predatory’, method of exploitation (‘exploitation by dispossession’ etc.), a ‘bad’ exploitation as opposed to the ‘good’ exploitation by the ‘productive’ capital, but a historic development
expressing the formal determinations innate in the capitalist mode of production.”

In its second volume, this book aims to link the academic research with development in the real world and provide a historical and institutional background that can enrich more formal research. The first section will include an assessment of the evolution and the state of the nascent second-generation biofuel as well as a perspective on the evolution of corn ethanol and sugarcane ethanol in Brazil. It will also include a historical and institutional background on the biofuel industry in Brazil that has global lessons, and later, provide a technical overview of major analytical tools used to assess the economic, land use and greenhouse gas implications of biofuel policies at a regional and global level.