Financial Warfare: Money As an Instrument of Conflict and Tension in the International Arena

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Financial Warfare: Money As an Instrument of Conflict and Tension in the International Arena Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2016 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2016 Financial Warfare: Money as an Instrument of Conflict and Tension in the International Arena Gianna Christine Fenaroli Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016 Part of the International Economics Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Fenaroli, Gianna Christine, "Financial Warfare: Money as an Instrument of Conflict and ensionT in the International Arena" (2016). Senior Projects Spring 2016. 136. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2016/136 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i Financial Warfare: Money as an Instrument of Conflict and Tension in the International Arena Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College by Gianna Fenaroli Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2016 ii Dedication and Acknowledgements I would like to dedicate this thesis to my family. To my father, who never fails to remind me that 99 out of 100 means I got something wrong, and is always up for witty banter. To my mother, who has given me constant love and support, and has been my rock. To my brother, who has shown me that people who say little have much more powerful words than those who say a lot. To my grandpa, for all of the Krugman articles throughout the years. To my nonno, for telling me to shoot for the stars. I would also like to thank my senior project advisor, Dr. Pavlina Tcherneva, for all of her invaluable input throughout the entire process, and helping me develop my theoretical framework for this project. Dr. Tcherneva’s support throughout my undergraduate career at Bard has been instrumental in my development as an economics student, and I am forever grateful. I would also like to thank my other economics professors who have played a key role in shaping my education in economics: James Andrew Felkerson, Dr. Olivier Giovannoni, Dr. Sanjaya DeSilva, Dr. Aniruddha Mitra, and Dr. James Green- Armytage. I would also like to thank my friends, who kept me sane during this demanding senior year. iii Abstract This project employs a historical, institutionalist, and legal approach to analyzing financial warfare, specifically utilizing a chartal-spatialist theory of money. Utilizing these theories in conjunction with historical case studies, a theory of financial warfare is developed through understanding money as a product of social stratification and hierarchy, and therefore that the creation of money itself is a process of power. The spatiality of a powerful money expands beyond its national borders, and hence there is a hierarchy within money itself in the international arena. To build the theory, this project includes three case studies of implementations of financial warfare, each of which add a piece to the overall story: counterfeiting, financial sanctions policy, and counterterrorism through the dismantling of terrorist organizations’ financial networks. As such, through focusing on money as an instrument of conflict and tension, the theory of financial warfare developed in this project focuses on the strength of a country’s currency, as well as its position in the international financial system. Given the fact that hegemony is relative, the theory outlines preconditions for successfully implementing financial warfare, which include having higher financial power relative to the target country, having macroeconomic flexibility through issuing a strong sovereign currency, and having an elastic access to the law as defined in Katherina Pistor’s legal theory of finance. This project further concludes that given its position as the issuer of the global reserve currency and the central authority in the international financial system, the United States is in the highest position of power to implement financial warfare. iv Table of Contents: Introduction..................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Literature Review and Theoretical Framework....................................................................4 1.1: A Brief History...........................................................................................................................4 1.2: Existing Literature.....................................................................................................................9 1.3: The Significance of Money......................................................................................................11 1.4: “Great powers have great currencies”......................................................................................13 1.5: The U.S. Dollar’s Ascent to Monetary Hegemony..................................................................16 1.6: Law and Finance......................................................................................................................20 1.7: A Theory of Financial Warfare.................................................................................................22 Chapter 2: A Systematic Analysis of Counterfeiting...............................................................................28 2.1: Prior Theoretical Treatment of Counterfeiting........................................................................28 2.2: Attacking the Sovereign..........................................................................................................33 2.3: Motives and Consequences for Counterfeiting Illustrated by Historical Cases......................36 2.4: Concluding Remarks...............................................................................................................45 Chapter 3: Financial Sanctions.................................................................................................................47 3.1: Defining Financial Sanctions...................................................................................................49 3.2: Existing Literature on Financial Sanctions..............................................................................50 3.3: The Iranian Case......................................................................................................................54 3.4: When Sanctions Did Not Work................................................................................................58 3.5: The U.S. Legal Reach..............................................................................................................60 3.6: Concluding Remarks................................................................................................................64 Chapter 4: A Taxonomic Approach to Analyzing Institutional Terrorist Financing...........................66 4.1: A Wake-Up Call.......................................................................................................................66 4.2: Following the Money...............................................................................................................70 4.3: Leading the Global Effort Against Terrorist Financing...........................................................80 4.4: Concluding Remarks...............................................................................................................85 Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................87 References...................................................................................................................................................90 ! 1 Introduction “In economics, the majority is always wrong.” - John Kenneth Galbraith We use theory to understand what is happening in the world around us, to understand our surroundings, to understand complex social relationships. Theory serves as the bridge between what is real and what we can comprehend. We create disciplines like economics to organize our theory around our constructed categories of real world phenomena. Economics has broadly been defined as the study of how people use their resources, act under limits of scarcity, and make decisions about production and distribution.1 It is something that we as humans have created to understand how the world works and how people behave. Whenever people misconstrue my major to be something more related to finance or accounting, I have always been quick to correct them, saying that economics is not only about money and financial markets, but instead it is a social science whose aim is to create a framework through which we can comprehend the decision making processes of people and institutions and explain complex social relationships. With that said, this project is about money and financial markets, and the hierarchy that exists within them. The aim of this project is to understand money as a source of international conflict and tension through employing
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