Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 38

As we shall see in chapter 4, chronicling the expanding roles of London and New York in the broader global political economy, professional services such as finance, law, accounting, insurance, and consulting have been given critically important new opportunities since around 1970 by the sharp expansion of cross-border financial transactions and the historic transformation of financial markets outlined above. Foreign direct investment, transnational bank lending, transnational bond issues, derivative transactions, and foreign-exchange operations have all expanded exponentially across the past half century, although at different rates and during different periods over those years. Expanding markets for equity finance, derivatives, and foreign-exchange transactions in innovative, knowledgeable global centers such as London led the way, generating concomitant demand for specialized political-economic information.

Initially, cross-border financial flows, including lending, foreign direct investment, and purchases of equities and bonds, grew from $500 billion in 1980 (4.1 percent of world GDP), to $11.9 trillion in 2007 (20.7 percent of world GDP). Since 2007 new financial flows have fallen to less than half their previous value ($5.2 trillion in 2014, or 6.55 percent of world GDP) in response to risk perceptions flowing from the 2008 global financial crisis.²² Yet data connectivity has continued to deepen, building on the embedded ties developed during the 1980–2007 period and driven by the need for better risk-assessment information to avoid financial debacles similar to what suddenly materialized following the 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.²³ Sharp increases over the past decade in transborder data flows show this unprecedented deepening of transnational connectivity quite clearly.

Considering that world trade networks took centuries to develop, this proliferation of cross-border data flows over the past two decades ranks among the most remarkable forces driving the rise of the global political city. And the acceleration during the past decade is especially impressive. It shows clearly that the cross-border information needs of the world political economy are continuing to grow and that, owing to this transformation, advanced communications technology is effectively working to address them.

As a consequence of the transformation in global finance, made possible by changing communications technology and deregulation, professional-services firms have consequently grown in number, expanded their analytical scope, and become markedly more affluent. They have naturally sought international political influence along four dimensions: (1) direct lobbying; (2) access to strategic information supporting their transnational profit seeking; (3) philanthropic activities; and (4) employment of highly skilled foreigners, or “transnational human capital.”

Growing and increasingly affluent services firms have, in turn, helped propel the rise of think tanks and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), by contributing both funding and expertise. As financial markets have simultaneously expanded their geographical scope, become more direct-finance (equity) oriented, and grown more volatile, country expertise and political-risk analysis have become correspondingly important. Like the services firms themselves, knowledge industries have clustered in large global cities, thereby reducing transaction costs and becoming themselves central elements of the cosmopolitan advisory complexes that I call penumbras of power.