The future of fossil capital is dictated not only by electrification but also by its relationship to what we refer to as ‘synthetic capital’. Synthetic capital captures the use of hydrocarbons as the material basis for the production and circulation of synthetics in all their varieties, suggestive of a related but distinct form of capital. Through a reading of the material and cultural roles that synthetics have played and continue to play in contemporary capitalism, underpinning mass production and consumption, we demonstrate how synthetic capital emerged as a means of overcoming the limitations to accumulation imposed by constraints on natural resource extraction. While synthetic capital aligns with fossil capital, the future of this historical alignment remains contested. The notion of synthetic capital thus brings to the surface increasingly important relations and contradictions in energy transitions, affording theoretical insights into the entrenched yet contested nature of fossil hydrocarbons within late capitalism.
A long-standing concern in debates on financialisation is that the growth of financial activity comes at the expense of production. This paper asks whether that concern holds at the sectoral level in South Africa, where deep and internationally integrated financial markets sit with a weak manufacturing sector and a broadly stagnant mining sector. Using quarterly data on mining and manufacturing from 1993 to 2023, the paper traces the relationship between the flow of funds into financial assets and sectoral production, with methods that separate short-lived movements from lasting relationships and allow finance and production to shape each other. Financial flows and production rise and fall together in the short run, clearly so in mining, while the evidence for manufacturing is weaker. Over the long run, the two drift apart, and neither sector shows evidence that financial accumulation durably displaces production. In annual data, financial flows and fixed investment move together, the opposite of what displacement would imply, and the influence of production on financial flows cannot be established with confidence. The paper provides sector-level evidence that the displacement often attributed to financialisation is conditional, and it directs attention to the macro-financial conditions, including the monetary policy stance, under which finance and production co-evolve in a resource-rich middle-income economy.
This is a review of Alexander Reisenbichler’s book, published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. It first summarizes the book’s argument and main findings, and then offers a critical appraisal of its contribution and overall argument. The review points out the limits of growth models when understood as mere institutional arrangements to understand the housing affordability crisis.
The Ghanaian economy relies heavily on the export of cocoa beans to generate foreign reserves, and many Ghanaian citizens rely directly or indirectly on cocoa beans for income generation. The cocoa bean price is highly volatile and largely determined at the international commodity exchange in London. Volatile prices translate into volatile revenues, income, and exchange rates, which pose challenges for the Ghanaian government to manage its internal and external balances. We build on John R. Commons’s institutional economics and propose an institutional theory of price to understand the pricing mechanisms along the cocoa chain. Drawing on interviews with cocoa stakeholders in and outside of Ghana between 2024 and 2025, we first map pricing points along the cocoa chain following our institutional theory of price and second, provide a political economy analysis of cocoa pricing and price uncertainty. We argue that Ghana’s price risk is managed by its counterparties to its disadvantage, with large multinational companies reaping the benefits from the institutional pricing arrangement. We conclude with tentative considerations about how this could change.
This paper investigates the unique trajectory of the Chinese REITs (C-REITs) market, which diverges from international market-led precedents by prioritizing strategic infrastructure over commercial real estate. Adopting a framework of ‘State-Led Infrastructure Financialization’, we argue that C-REITs represent a new form of ‘state entrepreneurialism’. Through policy analysis and a case study of an energy infrastructure REIT, the research reveals that the state employs ‘selective gating’ strategies to direct capital into the real economy while restricting residential real estate speculation. Findings demonstrate that the state utilizes a unique dual-layer governance structure to maintain control and mandates ‘capital recycling’ to fund the energy transition. We conclude that C-REITs function not merely as financial products but as governance tools, enabling the state to transition from ‘land finance’ to ‘asset finance’. This transition signifies an evolution of state entrepreneurialism from land-based accumulation to asset-based capital recycling.
