The chapter explores complex ascriptions of linguistic prestige in Belize’s multilingual and postcolonial context. The observations made challenge traditional binary models of overt and covert prestige. English, the former colonizer’s language, holds formal prestige linked to its global status, economic utility, and educational norms. However, this prestige coexists with linguistic insecurity, as many Belizeans combine local and exogenous norms. Conversely, Kriol carries polycentric prestige rooted in national identity, creativity, and resistance to colonial hegemony. It indexes reputation rather than respectability, aligning with Afro-European traditions and anti-standard ideologies. Despite its rise in public and formal domains, Kriol remains ideologically linked to informality, creativity, and resistance. The chapter also highlights the emic construction of ‘code-switching’, valued as the ability to distinguish English from Kriol, reflecting education and social status. This linguistic liquidity – marked by overlapping functions, fluid boundaries, and contradictory discourses – reflects the complex interaction of different forms of prestige in Belize.

This chapter is devoted to a linguistic analysis of the variable nature of English in public spaces in Belize, focusing on school, mass media, and research interviews. Adopting a decolonial perspective, it refrains from categorising English in Belize as a distinct and national variety. The analysis reveals significant linguistic variability in morphosyntax, phonetics, and prosody. Public English in Belize incorporates a range of forms influenced by Kriol, Spanish, and international English standards, challenging conventional notions of ’standard’ language. Morphosyntactic features reveal both local and non-local influences, while phonetic analyses reveal individual variations in vowel production linked to social, educational, and ideological factors. Prosodic variation, particularly pitch and intonation, emerges as a key marker of linguistic boundaries. English in Belize resists fixed categorisation and embodies a ’liquid’ linguistic character. This variability results from the absence of a hegemonic cultural and linguistic centre.

This chapter synthesises the findings and discusses how sociomaterial processes shape languages. Challenging modernist linguistic paradigms, it examines how language categories emerge through diverse cultural, historical, and material practices. The chapter critiques binary linguistic models and universalist, teleological assumptions of standardisation, showing that stable linguistic systems are not ‘natural’, but result from specific sociopolitical and material conditions. In contrast, fluid linguistic practices in postcolonial and globalised contexts exhibit variability, innovation, and complex indexicality. Belize’s multilingual environment exemplifies a setting without a hegemonic linguistic centre, producing liquid linguistic norms. The chapter argues for decolonial approaches to linguistics that embrace heterogeneity and that challenge exclusionary, Eurocentric models. Ultimately, it positions fluid linguistic practices as a cultural avant-garde and understands postcolonial environments as inspiring insights into future global sociolinguistic orders shaped by digitalisation and transnationalism.

Since the 1970s, global finance has taken on a systemic character, made starkly visible after Lehman Brothers’ collapse in 2008. Fifteen years later, how can we understand the ongoing reliance of society and economy on interconnected financial markets? This chapter examines the Anglo-American context with a global perspective, proposing that infrastructure is key to understanding why capitalist states and societies remain unable or unwilling to reduce the financial sector’s influence. By focusing on financial derivatives, particularly their liquid, marketized forms, it shows how these instruments forge new spatial and temporal connections. Despite political resistance, maintaining this liquidity has become a technical matter, obscuring the political-economic contradictions tied to socioeconomic inequality. Capitalist states now view derivative and broader financial markets as systems to be safeguarded from breakdowns or illiquidity, requiring immediate repair during crises. Extending the concept of (il)liquidity and drawing on infrastructural inversion, the chapter argues that financial markets exist in a perpetual state of breakdown, necessitating constant maintenance and repair.

The modern idea of Ireland as a nation-state formed from the break-up of empire in partition and decolonization proceeds from concepts of place and belonging that are largely territorial and landed. The recent centenaries of partition and the civil war have shown how little we thought of those literary works that expressed the diversity of life in the fractures between state and nation. This chapter asks how we might think more carefully now about the peripheral and the marginal as cultural registers of a contemporary experience that is historicizable in newly fluid ways. In one sense, this practice builds on decades of historicist and postcolonial criticism. In another, it relates to conversations going on in other parts of the academy, where terms like the Global South are being rethought in terms of their oceanic, and their cultural, futurity.

Digital platforms are marketplaces where a variety of participants gather to exchange goods, information, or services. This chapter examines what makes digital platforms special kinds of marketplaces. Platforms create value by allowing users to connect with each other and interact or transact in some way. The additional benefits include improved matching, trust, and liquidity, and lower costs of search and transaction. Digital platforms may thus create exceptionally efficient markets. However, the market for platforms themselves is anything but competitive and efficient. The benefits of scale in markets are not surprising, but the ability of digital markets to scale globally is much more recent. After platforms achieve critical mass, there is often no point for a rival to even enter, at least if the entrant offers no radical innovation. As a result, network effects allow platforms to concentrate vast market power.

A financial system channels funds from net savers to net spenders. But it does more than that, for the pie need not be fixed in size. Through its power of credit creation, the financial system can fuel economic expansion. The process is prone to fragility, however, and overshoot can end in crisis. A financial system encompasses financial intermediaries, which issue claims against themselves in order to provide funds to users (e.g., banks creating deposit accounts to make loans), and financial markets, which facilitate the direct exchange of claims between suppliers and users of funds (e.g., stocks and bonds). A diversity of channels for financing undertakings allows for the management and dispersion of risk. Interest rates and asset prices are determined in financial markets, with movement in the opposite direction of one another. Variation among the economies of Emerging East Asia is nowhere more stark than in the realm of finance. Hong Kong is home to the highest ratio of financial assets to GDP in the world while in the least developed economies of the region banking systems are rudimentary and capital markets little more than an idea.

The digitalised medical and health records of citizens are stored in the Electronic Health Records (EHR) of hospitals or clinics, and Personal Healthcare Records (PHR). The quality of medical care is improved when physicians can access the past records of patients. A user-friendly service that enables individual citizens to share their health and medical records in PHR with their physicians is essential to achieve this. In order to encourage patients and physicians to share medical records utilising PHR, while avoiding conflict with the recent trend demanding that citizens have autonomous control of their own personal information, governments have to develop legal measures to encourage individual citizens to take the initiative to record their medical and health data in their PHR and to give their physicians access to it. The author proposes mathematical schemes that can be implemented in the legal incentives deemed suitable for such encouragement.

Banks fail when an illiquidity event depletes capital reserves. Liquidity is sourced from assets that can readily be transformed into cash or from wholesale funding markets and central banks. Basel III strengthens bank balance sheets by allowing supervisors to release capital and liquidity reserves during times of market liquidity stress. This chapter analyzes the implementation of the Basel III capital and liquidity reforms in Hong Kong, banking sector stability during the 2008–9 global financial crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, and systemic supervision. Hong Kong is a unique international financial centre because it is overwhelmingly populated by domestic systemically important banks. Universal banking and Basel III compel banking sector supervision of Hong Kong’s securities and insurance sectors, despite falling outside the supervisory design of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. This chapter argues that different supervisory structures and models affect the regulation and supervision of financial stability in Hong Kong’s banking sector. Insurance and wealth management products in the banking industry can produce systemic risks that might be overlooked by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Supervisory bias towards the banking sector in conjunction with cross-sectoral underlap could cause financial instability and a systemic banking crisis in Hong Kong.

Financial crises have a tendency to expose the financial system’s inability to absorb large systemic shocks, the critical role of liquidity channels, and financial institutions with fragile balance sheets. Pinpointing the causes of systemic risk challenges supervisors because the range of risks are virtually unlimited. This chapter argues that the definition of financial stability must be revisited to enhance the efficacy of financial supervision by drawing upon the lessons learnt from the 2008–9 global financial crisis. Defining systemic risk requires a real-time perspective of risk transmissions between the financial system components. Supervisors should appreciate financial agglomeration, the interconnectedness of the financial system, and behavioural economics when regulating systemic risk. Liquidity mismatches that destabilize financial institutions’ balance sheets and the capacity to raise funding can cause financial instability. The inability of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to control monetary policy constrains its power to fully manage these liquidity risks. Mitigating financial instability caused by systemic liquidity risks requires an understanding of prudential regulation and the management of monetary policy to stabilize bank balance sheets. Financial architecture must be properly utilized by supervisors to restore the orderly and rational functioning of the financial system.

Seamus Heaney's attention to the landscape has obscured his interest in riverbanks, lough shores and coastlines. Images of water and liquidity are critical to his writing, as are narratives of the sea and its crossings. This chapter traces Heaney's fluid aesthetic throughout his career, with particular attention to his declension of water in all its forms as evolving metaphors for mortality. Reading a series of texts across the breadth of Heaney's career, it engages his work with critical conversations in archipelagic literature.

The traditional business of banking is taking deposits and providing loans. Banks have a comparative advantage over other financial institutions in providing liquidity. They have also developed technologies to screen and monitor borrowers in order to reduce asymmetric information between the lender and the borrower. These liquidity-providing and monitoring functions also give banks a key role in modern capital market transactions. Risk is fundamental to the business of banking. Progress in information technology, combined with demands by supervisory authorities, has spurred the development of advanced risk management models. This, in turn, has prompted the centralisation and integration of some management functions such as risk management, treasury operations, compliance, and auditing. This integrated risk management method is designed to ensure a comprehensive and systematic approach to risk-related decisions throughout the banking group. Banks with an integrated risk management unit can exploit diversification opportunities at the group level. The Chapter ends by describing the European banking market, which is made up of 27 national banking systems.

Based on a thorough analysis of the BIS Annual Reports from the early 1970s to the late 2010s, this chapter traces the evolution of the BIS’s thinking on the international monetary and financial system. It demonstrates how – as a result of the growth of the Eurocurrency markets in the 1970s and of the sovereign debt crisis of the 1980s – the BIS’s traditional focus on exchange rates and their potential impact on monetary stability gradually shifted to global capital flows and to the risks posed by an increasingly complex and interconnected banking system. The 1995 Mexico crisis and 1997–8 Asian crisis reinforced this shift and led to an overriding concern with the procyclicality of the financial system as a potential threat to financial stability. While recognising that the focus of the BIS on a macro-financial stability framework has contributed a lot to advancing the work of the Basel-based committees and standard-setting bodies, the chapter also concludes that not much progress has been made in coordinating monetary policies or in addressing the fundamental problem of excessive elasticity of the financial system.