The scheduling has done this documentary series no favours. Welcome to Lagos has coincided each Thursday night with an event, the TV debate between the three party leaders, which has not only turned this election on its head, but which may have changed politics in this country forever. If you can ignore history being made… Read More »
The Nigerian government has decided to implement a common year-end for Nigerian banks. The point is that, because banks have had different fiscal cycles they could move money around amongst each other to inflate the value of their total assets. Which was part of what contributed to the banking crisis of ’09. The immediate reaction:… Read More »
I am just about to finish reading anthropologist Karen Ho‘s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. She carried out seventeen months of fieldwork on Wall Street, interviewing and observing investment bankers. Actually, she started out as a rookie analyst working in management consulting in a hybrid investment and commercial bank. She had the intention of… Read More »
Stephen Gudeman’s post on the Association of Social Anthropologists’ Globalog series on the financial crisis: Economists may see economies as flat or smooth plains consisting of markets and market-like behavior that lead to equilibrium situations, but I think they consist of overlapping and conflicting spheres of value and practices. I label these fuzzy-edged spaces House,… Read More »
I just read here that Nigeria is the “fastest growing generator” of sovereign wealth over the last five years, recording a growth of 291 percent. Nigeria outperformed other countries that had also made significant progress including Oman, which grew its sovereign wealth by 256 percent; Kazakhstan (162 percent); Angola (84 percent); Russia (74 percent), and… Read More »