Seminar The social rights of citizens in an age of financialisation The role of the US Federal Reserve Add to calendar 2022-06-13 17:00 2022-06-13 18:30 Europe/Rome The social rights of citizens in an age of financialisation Sala Triaria, Villa Schifanoia and Zoom YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Jun 13 2022 17:00 - 18:30 CEST Sala Triaria, Villa Schifanoia, and Zoom Organised by Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Join Desmond King and the Political Economy Working Group for a discussion on the United States' Federal Reserve and its role in contributing to inequality and financialisation The recent collection by Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson and Kathleen Thelen editors of The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (CUP 2022; and essay "American Political Economy" Annual Review of Political Science 2022) introduces political economy arguments to the US case but omits discussion of the US's primary financial institution, the Federal Reserve. This paper addresses the role of this institution in contributing to inequality and financialisation. Building on Jacobs-King's book, Fed Power: How Finance Wins (OUP 2016 and 2021), we begin by discussing the governance of finance: the domestic institutional framework that defines the role of central banks and the preferences of two critical constituents in finance - wage earners and high-asset investors. The next section examines the institutions, interests, and coalitions that define the domestic political configurations of power and struggle. The third section examines two primary policy responses to capital markets and domestic political configurations. We advance a conceptual framework for analysing the distributional effects of central banks by incorporating the social rights of citizenship alongside the operations of capital markets.