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This paper reconstructs the National Income and Product Accounts to add asset-price (‘capital’) gains to national income to derive a measure of total returns. It also treats rent-extraction as a charge against national income and GDP, not as a contribution to national output. Segregating the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector from the rest of the private sector shows that most growth in wealth and income derives from rentier activities – from the dynamic of finance capitalism more than that of industrial capitalism.

Marx and many of his less radical contemporary reformers saw the historical role of industrial capitalism as being to clear away the legacy of feudalism—the landlords, bankers, and monopolists extracting economic rent without producing real value. However, that reform movement failed. Today, the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector has regained control of government, creating neo-rentier economies. The aim of this postindustrial finance capitalism is the opposite of industrial capitalism as known to nineteenth-century economists: it seeks wealth primarily through the extraction of economic rent, not industrial capital formation. Tax favoritism for real estate, privatization of oil and mineral extraction, and banking and infrastructure monopolies add to the cost of living and doing business. Labor is increasingly exploited by bank debt, student debt, and credit card debt while housing and other prices are inflated on credit, leaving less income to spend on goods and services as economies suffer debt deflation. Today’s new Cold War is a fight to internationalize this rentier capitalism by globally privatizing and financializing transportation, education, health care, prisons and policing, the post office and communications, and other sectors that formerly were kept in the public domain. In Western economies, such privatizations have reversed the drive of industrial capitalism. In addition to monopoly prices for privatized services, financial managers are cannibalizing industry by leveraging debt and high-dividend payouts to increase stock prices. JEL Classification: B26, N20, B51

This essay argues that late nineteenth-century American fiction, as exemplified by William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), is entangled in the period’s embrace of a new understanding of economic conditions, one premised on the significance of consumer data as the raw material of economic interpretation and fixated on mathematical analysis as a source of knowledge about value. Marginalism in economic theory and realism in American literary practice were contemporaneous efforts to mediate value at a moment of decisive transition in America, as a model of commodity-centered competitive capitalism yielded to the regime of corporate finance. The young academic economists of the period and their literary counterparts explained the economic landscape in much the same way and to many of the same ends. Both began with the daunting question of how to reimagine value in a world characterized by fictitious goods and increasingly abstract financial instruments, a world in which the labor theory of value seemed hopelessly outdated. Both responded to this challenge by proposing novel intellectual procedures for making values appear stable again by focusing on the subjective experiences of consumers. Finally, both marginalists and realists sought to provide a quasi-scientific bedrock for fixing values in consumer society not only by appealing nostalgically to an economy of actual goods and honest work but more importantly by accommodating readers, policy makers, and stakeholders of all kinds to the new realities of finance capitalism.

In this article, I examine normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. Policy makers and social scientists often assume cash transfers are apolitical, value-neutral monetary instruments, which improve upon inappropriate, top-down, universalizing development projects. Instead, I show how cash transfers introduce their own universals, by imagining liberal sovereign subjects, who use credit and financial markets to manage their own financial and developmental needs. I argue that this narrative elides the deep historical and geographical production of racial difference through credit and debt in South Africa’s Western Cape farmlands. I call this phenomenon racial finance capitalism. First, I trace how coloured people have been racialized as debtors for the benefit of capital accumulation across generations. Then, I explore how the contemporary spatial and temporal realities of cash transfer distribution continue to racialize grantees as debtors and dispossess them of their social entitlements. Finally, I demonstrate how grantees draw upon transgenerational experiences of debt to challenge the continued social reproduction of themselves as debtors. Some South African social grantees demand recognition that they are, and have been, net creditors to the nation.

Prévost’s memoir-novel, L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, engages with the challenges of deploying traditional modes of literary description (characterology and allegorization) in the nascent reign of finance capitalism. This article examines the interrelationship between abstraction and material existence in the early eighteenth-century French bestseller Manon Lescaut. By underscoring the ambivalences of class ideology via the context of financial revolution, I argue that Prévost experiments with a new moral economy of selfhood that grapples with, and perhaps ultimately loosens itself from, the strictures of ancien régime social identity.

The aftermath of the most recent financial crisis has prompted a surge of interest in the impact of finance capitalism on national economies and individual livelihoods. Yet, research on the impact of financialization on income inequality, remains scant and inconclusive. Using data for 33 countries over 1996–2015, we provide evidence that of the three financialization dimensions - of the financial, nonfinancial and household sectors - only household financialization exerts a positive and robustly significant impact on income inequality. Re-estimations by system generalized-methods-of-moments (SYS-GMM) and difference-GMM as well as alternative income inequality measures, confirm the significant, positive impact of household indebtedness over all other financialization dimensions. Following disaggregation of household financialization into its three main components (mortgage, consumer and other purposes debt), we also uncover that it is increasing levels of household debt aimed at sustaining living standards that is accountable for the positive impact on income inequality, whilst mortgage debt reduces it.

This paper argues that the analysis of financial processes is essential for understanding changes in the financial system. Those processes give rise to appearances such as the statistical data that are the basis of most studies of financialisation. In their turn, this paper argues, financial processes are fundamentally determined by the structure of the financial system and, in particular, corporate finance which, through its effect on business investment, influences the dynamics of the capitalist system. That structure changes through particular phases of capitalist development. The author closest to this approach was Hyman P. Minsky. However, his approach was not especially systematic. The paper puts forward a more systematic periodization of capitalist through mercantile capitalism, classic, bank-based capitalism, finance capital, state finance capitalism, to pension fund capitalism and capital market inflation. The paper shows how each period ends with financing difficulties that are overcome with financial innovation leading to a new financial structure with corresponding changes in financial processes. The paper argues that the phase of capital market inflation, inaugurated by funded pension schemes in the last decades of the twentieth century, has come to an end in the illiquidity of capital markets that lies behind the 2008 financial crisis. The paper suggests that the measures of ‘unconventional monetary policy’ or ‘Quantitative Easing’ mark a new period of state finance capital with a return to the state support of a structurally illiquid capital market that prevailed in Europe and North America from the 1930s to the 1960s.

This article considers the future of financialisation as it is entwined with that of cities. It poses the question of how cities can regulate financialisation. ‘Financialization’ is understood here to encompass the myriad of social, economic, legal and political dimensions of the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. This transition implicates the financial sector and their motives as well as the new roles that financial ideas play in everyday lives. That new role for finance has been understood to be a ‘normative order of reason’ that informs public decision-making and governance. While the efforts of national and transnational law to regulate the financial sector have been studied, there has been far less focus on local governments. Local governments, however, play a crucial role in how financial capitalism takes hold through their regulation of real estate and urban space (real estate being a key current engine of financial markets). Local governments mediate the ways that finance takes hold in cities and the built environment and the way that those transformations exclude certain populations. In short, they mediate the ‘spatialization’ of finance. This triangular constitution of local governance, financialisation and urban space can be observed in the shrinking of public space. The article first examines the relationship between public space and democracy, and the role of law as the underlying structure that allocates urban space towards the use of the public or the use of private real estate actors. This engagement demonstrates how urban space is a key site of financialisation’s dual dimensionality: as a sector with material accumulation of resources and as a constellation of rationalities and cultures. The article then turns to a discussion of city efforts to regulate the financial sector, and popular resistance to the ideologies of finance. Through that examination, this article hopes to demonstrate that efforts to regulate the financial sector are only one level on which to regulate financialisation. ‘Regulation’ here becomes a complex endeavour, requiring an engagement with the modes of reasoning and culture promulgated by financialisation as well as the financial sector and its activities.

Edward Sugden, “The Speculative Economies of Sheppard Lee” (pp. 141–166) In this essay I provide a reading of Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) that places it against the speculative economy of 1830s America. The novel is, formally and intellectually, a product of and meditation on economic speculation. It dwells upon the ways in which a transition from an agrarian economy into finance capitalism impacts the body. Where many accounts of Sheppard Lee emphasize embodiment as the central issue of the novel, this essay instead insists on disembodiment, demonstrating how the entry into a transregional, virtual economy of stocks and shares, debts, loans, and mortgages dissolved embodied identity. Such a dissolution came, however, with a possible utopian element, encoded within capitalism, of there being an economic form that did not depend on the exploitation and mining of the labor-power of bodies. Yet this fantasy of worklessness, the novel suggests, will always require a space of civil death in which those without rights are relentlessly used for their economic value only. Overall, this reading of the novel modifies a metanarrative about the relationship between capitalism and the imagination in nineteenth century. Rather than literature providing a stable basis for social values disrupted by capitalism, instead a novel like Sheppard Lee suggests that the form of the novel is more suited to capturing the chaos of dislocation, meditating on unactivated historical possibilities latent within capitalism, and internalizing short-term cycles of economic change.

The global spread of finance capitalism has ushered in a speculative nature of currency trade and has given rise to new forms of subjectivity. Narrowing the ethnographic gaze on a thirty-seven year...

The financial crash that was in full force in the Fall of 2008 triggered the Great Recession. This chapter explores the deeper reasons behind the crisis. Three in particular are noted: the uncritical promotion of homeownership; the enthronement of finance capitalism in a time of global deregulation; and regulatory capture. The crisis was years in the making as the deregulation of the financial system introduced after the Great Depression led to a relentless financialization of the US economy that saw mortgages as just one financial product. And in a classic example of moral hazard, the costs of the risky behavior of financial institutions was paid by the federal government and the US taxpayer.

This chapter aims at demystifying rent in order to facilitate overcoming its nefarious consequences at political and social levels. Usually, rents are held account for underdevelopment without taking into account that rents can be used for development. This chapter analyzes possibilities, challenges and limitations of channeling rent into development in order to achieve self-sustaining and capitalist growth in formerly non-capitalist societies. In this perspective, the current task for the forces of progress in the Global South consists of the transition to market economies based on the welfare state: This means as much market as possible together with as much planning as necessary. In this perspective, monopoly capitalism and finance capitalism appear as anticapitalist deviations which emerge because of too little political and social embeddedness of the respective market economies.

This chapter documents how the venture capital system captures yearnings for technological alternatives. It follows the workings of a foreign-funded hardware incubator program in Shenzhen that trained people to translate their commitments to social justice into a pitch for finance capital. The incubator program taught people how to see themselves as human capital. Human capital, political theorist Wendy Brown suggests, “is the next step of homo oeconomicus as a neoliberal agent that seeks to strengthen his/her competitive positioning. Neoliberal rationality remakes the human being as human capital.” The chapter then shows that the turning of the self into human capital is all but an inevitable outcome of neoliberal capitalism but has to be actively taught and learned.

International audience; The present REPE issue 2-2020 is the second part of our inaugural "double pack". We were lucky to receive more papers for the inaugural issue than we could accommodate in one issue. So please enjoy another set of challenging original research papers gauging the field of evolutionary political economy. In Financialisation and the periodisation of capitalism: appearances and processes, Jan Toporowski argues that the analysis of financial processes is essential for understanding changes in the financial system. Only these processes give rise to appearances such as the statistical data that are the basis of most studies of financialization. Those processes are fundamentally determined by the structure of the financial system. Following Minsky, Toporowski focuses on corporate finance which, through its effect on business investment, influences the dynamics of the capitalist system. As financial structures change, this gives rise to particular phases of capitalist development. The paper thus builds on Minsky's historical institutional analysis, but offers a more systematic analysis. It offers a periodization of capitalism through mercantile capitalism, classic, bank-based capitalism, finance capital, state finance capitalism, to pension fund capitalism and capital market inflation. It shows how each period ends with financial difficulties that are overcome with financial innovation leading to a new financial structure with corresponding changes in financial processes. Specifically, the paper argues that the phase of capital market inflation, inaugurated by funded pension schemes in the last decades of the twentieth century, has come to an end in the illiquidity of capital markets that lies behind the 2008 financial crisis. The paper suggests that the measures of "unconventional monetary policy", or "Quantitative Easing", mark a new period of state finance capital with a return to the state support of a structurally illiquid capital market that already had prevailed in Europe and North America from the 1930s to the 1960s. The discipline of International Political Economy-IPE has been flirting with evolutionary approaches for the past decade or so. So far, attempts to develop a take on evolutionary theory have proceeded in a rather unstructured way: They range from potential applications of Darwinian theory of selection to more recent efforts to draw on ecological approaches and complexity theory when analysing crises and transformations. There has also been a renewed interest in institutionalist approaches and heterodox tradition, but this too, has been a fragmented process. Ronen Palan's article An Evolutionary Approach to International Political Economy: The Case of Corporate Tax Avoidance aims to offer a pathway to a more systemic framework of evolutionary political economy, in order to rethink the changes in the regulation on the contemporary system of states. Palan develops his approach by distinguishing between a tradition of political economy based on action of discreet entities (this reflects the roots of IPE in neoclassical economics) and a tradition of thought centred around a concept of transaction (taking root in original institutional economics). This framework

Based on a discussion of the structural transformation of the Mexican economy, this paper investigates the impact of financialization on agriculture’s role in capitalist development. It argues that...

Is fossil fuels divestment likely to achieve its aims? This article evaluates the rationales for divestment in terms of their capacity to give the campaign influence. It focuses on the direct effects of divestment on financial actors because divestment is a specific means of exerting influence outside of conventional political channels. In seeking to end fossil fuel industries in order to halt climate change, the campaign deploys a variety of arguments to win support and wield influence, namely: the legality of divestment and, indeed, the emerging duty to divest; investors' moral responsibility to avoid complicity in the fossil fuels economy; investors' moral responsibility to use their leverage against climate polluters; and the power of financial sanctions to create a business case for abandoning fossil fuels. Although in combination they may be effective, each of these asserted rationales has some limitations that may diminish the influence of the divestment movement. Moreover, the movement does not engage sufficiently with the systemic qualities of finance capitalism that must also be reckoned with in order to address broader patterns of environmental unsustainability. Although the divestment movement aspires also to ultimately change government policies on climate change, it may achieve greater influence by also seeking better government regulation of the financial economy.

Claims of global homogenization towards a singular model of finance capitalism constitute a “financialization convergence hypothesis” that has not been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. Usi...

This article is concerned with the genesis of German financial liberalisation. A refined inventory of financial system change – including new meso-level data on finance pattern and the marketisation of banking – reveals a varied pattern of change across German finance. It is argued that this financial diversification can only be understood with careful reference to the underlying ideational factors. An analytical narrative traces how technocratic ideas of financial modernisation during the 1980s began to open up space for the political program of finance capitalism to absorb liberal and leftist discontents with insider control and bank dominance. Upon reaching a tipping point of discursive dominance, the program was distinctly adopted across the political economy as the result of compartmentally different political, ideational and structural factors; creating a non-hegemonic financial paradigm that became identifiable in the face of recent crises. By developing analytical steps that link increment...

Capitalism has become progressively more unstable since the welfare state became attenuated and the Cold War ended. Finance capitalism was restored, and monopolistic competition has been rejuvenated. Economic control is more concentrated than ever. The reserve army of labour has been partially restored, and investment controlled. In turn that led to vast accumulations of money in banks, private equity and other forms of money holding, while the economy ultimately fell into its crisis. Austerity has failed to hold the fort, leading to a combination of concessions to the far right while maintaining austerity. There have been no concessions to deal with the overall stagnation, real mass unemployment and low productivity. The logic of the situation leads to increased disintegration combined with repression and a slow-growing mass movement of the working class. There are no more intermediate stages to socialism.

This paper explores how finance capitalism materializes as socio-ecological process, shedding light on the complex causalities in which current shifts in control over natural resources are embedded. Housing is a critical aspect of financialization. A case study of the financialized housing sector in Central Mexico shows (i) how housing policy serves as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth from the working class to global finance capital, and (ii) how mortgage-financed housing projects come into being only through an existing water governance regime, while in turn leading to new structures of groundwater governance with profound social and ecological implications. The paper concludes that current accumulation and natural resource regimes interact in complex and contradictory ways that go beyond straightforward resource grabbing. It suggests that Moore’s concept of ‘capitalism in the web of life’ could help to understand how finance capitalism simultaneously transforms the socio-natural worl...

The theoretical argument of this chapter is that the firm is best seen as a collectively managed resource or “commons” which is subject to a number of multiple, overlapping, and potentially conflicting property type claims on the part of the different constituencies or stakeholders who provide value to the firm. The sustainability of the corporation depends on ensuring proportionality of benefits and costs with respect to the inputs made to corporate resources, and on the participation of the different stakeholder groups in the formulation of rules governing the management and use of resources. Viewing the corporation as a commons in this sense is the first step toward a better understanding of the role that the corporate form can play in ensuring wider social and natural sustainability.

International audience; How might we critically approach the television series in a way that accounts for the nature of its form, a form which carries both ideological and economic ramifications? Few would deny that series fit awkwardly into an academic framework, by reason of their industrial volume, and because audience interest declines rapidly once they have disappeared from the screen. One could try to constitute a canon as in literary or film studies, but it is nevertheless difficult, if not impossible, to fully circumscribe a "work" sometimes extending to hundreds of episodes. 1 The choice made here is a synthesis, in very general terms, which encompasses the more commercial network series and the "quality" series produced by cable television, and which integrates on an equal basis the three terms evoked in the opening sentence: ideology , economy, and … form. Any direct attempt to relate the ideological and economic dimensions of a particular series is more or less doomed to the reductionism of the base/superstructure model. We would do well to remember, however, that the very principle of seriality in its two historical forms, the serial and the series, was determined from the outset by commercial factors, beginning with the serialized publications, both in 1836, of Balzac's La Vieille Fille in France, and of Dick-ens' The Pickwick Papers in Britain. In effect, serialization was invented to increase and consolidate the circulation of the periodic press. For similarly commercial reasons, the recurring main character was a mainstay of popular genre literature, especially the detective novel. 2 For the sake of argument, in purely formal terms, the television series can be seen as a derivative of what was originally a literary form. Seriality in its different guises has never existed outside of considerations of economic rationality (unless one wants to stretch a point). The daytime serial and the weekly series were present at the beginning of the television medium as privileged forms that enabled the advance sale of advertising time on the basis of relatively predictable audience levels. I propose therefore to explore the link between the economic and the ideological through the mediation of form, especially through the internal variations within the series form. For my purposes, the internal form adopted by the series at a given historical moment preempts the analysis of the content of any particular series (and thus, a fortiori, of any particular episode) Three theoretical suppositions anchor my argument. First, Adorno's claim that "form … is itself sedimented content" (Adorno, Adorno, and Tiedeman, 1997; see also the discussions in Jameson, 1990, 1992). The context here is a philosophical argument about the autonomy of "authentic" art, and Adorno would surely not have approved of its application to products of

This essay attempts to examine some of the core features of the world of work in contemporary India, with global capitalism as the backdrop. Among the important dimensions of the current neoliberal capitalism, the paper highlights two of these, namely ascendancy of finance capital and significant decentring of production from the North to the South and their implications for labour regimes. First, given that the core of financialized accumulation rests on circulation and speculation (through a large number of instruments) and that finance is globalized, real economy everywhere tends to come under huge pressure. Second, the share of surplus in world output during the neoliberal era has seen a noticeable increase, which through multiple channels, contributes to tendencies towards under-consumption and compression in the growth of labour demand. Third, given that finance capital has a strong antipathy to government expenditure, fiscal deficits, etc. in the context of neoliberalism, where finance is footloose and internationally mobile, nation states generally abide by the whims and fancies of finance which further exacerbates deflationary tendencies through curtailment of expenditure. Fourth, policies for the protection of labour in general social policies have become victims of the above-noted major features of neoliberal globalization. These themes are discussed in this essay with special focus on the world of work in contemporary India.

The world's political and economic tectonic plates are shifting. The old paradigm of mainstream neoclassical economics is collapsing. Paradigmatic revolution is in the air. But what form should paradigmatic revolution take? Western 'free market' finance capitalism is the main cause of present problems and so must be rejected: and also rejected is communism/socialism which abhors Allah, is politically oppressive, and is materially inefficient. The answer lies with genuinely independent nations which have economies free from fiba. These new economies will possess their own money supply and will not rely upon financial capital coming from abroad. Eschewing riba-interest (and interest-equivalents as in forms of Islamic banking), they will be based upon the use of national bank-issued interest-free loans which can be administered by the banking system (imposing only a charge for administration). These loans are for the development and spreading of productive (and associated consuming) capacity to every individual in society. The result is a proper balance of supply and demand (as is required by Say's Theorem) and a forwarding of social and economic justice. The new economics also founds new political, social and environmental solutions.

Using documents from the Grand Lodge of Free & Accepted Masons of the State of Indiana (USA), I show how the material practices and symbolic orientations of finance capitalism became transposed into Freemasonry in the early-nineteenth century. I briefly discuss why this happened and point to how these developments shaped the institutional trajectory of Freemasonry. Next, I observe that the symbolic moral standing of Freemasonry became transposed onto finance capitalism as undertaken by its members and other white men like them. After a brief explanation, I outline how these developments affected the institutionalisation of finance capitalism.

Amid public critiques of Wall Street's amorality and protests against sharpening inequality since the financial crisis of 2008, the emergent discourse of philanthrocapitalism – philanthropic capitalism – has sought to recuperate a moral centre for finance capitalism. Philanthrocapitalism seeks to marry finance capital with a moral commitment to do good. These strategies require new financial instruments to make poverty reduction and other forms of social welfare profitable business ventures. Social impact bonds (SIBs) – which offer private investors competitive returns on public sector investments – and related instruments have galvanized the financialization of both public services and the life possibilities of poor communities in the USA and the Global South. This article maps new intrusions of credit and debt into previously unmarketable spheres of life, such as prison recidivism outcomes, and argues that contemporary social finance practices such as SIBs are inextricable from histories of race – that ...

In this article, we examine the theoretically constructed case of private equity in the UK anno 2007. The theory at play is the theoretical edifice Luc Boltanski has been developing for more than two decades and which concerns the underlying architectonics of how social reality is constituted, challenged and stabilized. We thus interweave the story of private equity with the evolution of Boltanski’s work: from the six-world model to the widening of the critical notion of ‘test’ and the outline of a new ‘connexionist’ capitalist logic, and finally to his most recent attempts at reconnecting his sociology of critical practices with a more traditional critical sociology. Now that Boltanski’s work from the 1990s is being increasingly used and critiqued in our field, we believe it is important to engage with his more recent writings which, while less easy to ‘apply’, have acquired more depth, complexity and a change in focus in response to some of the more pertinent critique. The case of private equity is of particular interest in that for a brief moment it became the ‘face’ of 21st century capitalism, something which is significant in the broadening of our discussion into the possibilities and the limits of critique under a financialized capitalism.

There is a broad consensus that financialization has brought many disadvantages and few benefits. This raises a simple question: How did it come about? Why did professional observers allow it to happen even though financialization was not a hidden process? Can we identify sources of legitimation for financialization? To limit the scope of our analysis, we focus on the role of banks to answer these questions. We study changing expectations towards banks from a transdisciplinary perspective, using insights from macroeconomics, sociology and political science. We find that the legitimation of financialization has been multi-faceted. However, at many crucial junctures, the perceived but doubtful need to “increase competition” for banks has tipped the scale in favor of the policies underlying it. The disciplining effects of competition though, have not resulted in less cakes and ale for banks.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the intellectual climate of macroeconomic thinking and policy that helped to foster in the period leading up to the crisis a belief in the inherent stability of finance capitalism, a relaxed regulatory regime for banking and finance and a widening in the scope of capital market activity. The three pillars of this framework were the emergence of a new macroeconomic consensus among new classical and new Keynesian economists, the efficient market theory of finance and the capital structure irrelevance assumption of corporate finance. Each of these pillars had a distinguished list of academic adherents and policy advocates but involved a number of analytical restrictions that limited their scope for clear practical applications.

In this article I explore empirically the determinants of the persistent cross-national variation in finance capitalism in advanced democracies. I find that the degree of strategic coordination through extra-market institutions – which protect the economic system from class and sectoral pressures and promote collaboration among state agencies, financiers, managers, and labor organizations – contributes to a country's domestic banking and financial intermediary-based development but is less conducive to the development of its securities markets. The financial liberalization reforms of the 1990s meant the emergence of an asymmetric corporatist system, whereby banks and other financial institutions played a crucial role in defining the new rules of financial governance. Conducting a panel data analysis encompassing 18 advanced democracies over the period of 1960–2005, I find evidence of the impact of strategic coordination on financial development, while controlling for alternative explanations and e...

The paper explores the financial accounts database of Eurostat, a rich set of data that is largely unexploited. It describes the main financial developments at EU level during the 1990-2010 period, both in terms of institutional agents and financial products. The paper provides evidence on the consequences of asset price inflation for wealth distribution between institutional agents and argues that the conceptual scheme of the ?double monetary circuit? of existing and recycled savings helps in describing and explaining the observed patterns of financialisation.

Does corporate governance play a role in income inequality? If so, how? This paper pursues this inquiry, beginning with an examination of the causes of significant income inequality throughout twentieth and early twenty-first century American history. The parallel developments of financial practices and board structures over these periods reveal the relatively contemporaneous rises of shareholder valuism and the modern monitoring board, with the latter providing institutional structure and norm propagation for the former, thus serving as a corporate governance channel through which income inequality is perpetuated. History further reveals the monitoring board to be an institutional component of finance capitalism, and the so-called managerial board that dominated during a period of relative income equality to be an institutional component of industrial capitalism.Some cautious reform suggestions are offered, but the purpose of this paper primarily is diagnostic. It also serves as a cautionary tale for developing nations in the process of building their institutional structures.

Facing rapid capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century, Britons reflected on the webs of commercial exchange in which they were embedded. Focusing on John Stuart Mill’s notion of the perpetual reproduction of capital alongside literary forms and tropes (Gothicism, mythological imagery, the theme of speculation, and treasure-hunt plots), this essay explores Victorian global consciousness. The past employment of slave labour in the colonies haunted the Victorians, who were also increasingly alarmed by finance capitalism’s reliance on abstractions. Cosmopolitan sympathy for the nation’s trading partners flourished in literature alongside the effort to obscure the foreign sources of the nation’s wealth.

In this paper I discuss a dramatic financial collapse and scandal in Denmark in the interwar period. I analyze the asset price bubble from 1914 to 1920 and the subsequent failure in 1922 of Scandinavia's largest bank, the Danish Landmandsbanken, as well as the downfall of its CEO Emil Glückstadt. I discuss the sense-making process, first during the bubble and then following Landmandsbanken's collapse and Glückstadt's fall from power in 1922, and finally until the introduction of a new bank act in 1930. I further argue that such crises and scandals force contemporaries to make sense of the dramatic fall from the top of society of these icons and of their role in the collapse of their banks. I view the sense-making process as centered on the construction of narratives that explain the crisis and enable or constrain institutional response to the crisis. To conclude, I argue that the process of sense-making in the case of Landmandsbanken can be generalized as the way in which society enforces norms and values in cases of dramatic financial crisis and scandal.

‘The individual’ has been a central feature of western political thought for 300 years. However, the continuous transformation of the capitalist system, its tendency toward monopoly, its accelerating extension of commodification into the remaining global commons, particularly into the realms of knowledge and culture, is undermining the political function of this fundamental concept. The subordination and/or elimination of the owner-entrepreneur means that claims to represent ‘the individual’ appear less and less credible. Increasingly coercive measures are required to facilitate the extraction of surplus value. The decline of liberal individualism (in its 19th-century form at least) is not temporary. Its central tenets will never again be fully embraced since they no longer offer a credible means of representing the needs of either industrial or finance capitalism in a favourable light.

The Great Recession resulting from the globalization of Finance Capitalism created two structural labor crises for developed economies: 1) The channeling of substantial investment into non-productive, paper commodities, reducing growth of production for use and therefore reducing available aggregate job creation; and 2) The continued exportation of industrial jobs to other lower cost jurisdictions, and outsourcing, automation, just-in-time production, and speed-ups associated with global supply chains. As a result, local communities and regional populations have destabilized and even collapsed with attendant social problems. One possible response is Community Syndicalism – local community finance and operating credit for industrial production combined with democratic worker ownership and control of production. The result would increase investment directly for production, retain jobs in existing population centers, promote job skilling, and retain tax bases for local services and income supporting local businesses, at the same time increasing support for authentic political democracy by rendering the exploitive ideology of the Public/Private distinction superfluous. Slowing job exportation may reduce the global race to the bottom of labor standards and differential wage rates reducing the return to producers of value and increasing the skew of income distribution undermining social wages and welfare worldwide. Community Syndicalism can serve as moral goal in an alternative production model focusing incentives on long term stability of jobs and community economic base. La Gran Recesión que ha traído la globalización del capitalismo financiero ha dado lugar a dos crisis laborales estructurales en las economías desarrolladas: 1) El destino principal de la inversión hacia bienes no productivos, reduciendo la producción de bienes de consumo, y reduciendo también las posibilidades de creación de puestos de trabajo, y 2) el traslado de puestos de trabajo industriales a otras jurisdicciones para reducir costes, y la externalización, la automatización, la producción "justo a tiempo", y las prisas relacionadas con las cadenas de suministro globales. Como resultado, las comunidades locales y poblaciones regionales se han desestabilizado e incluso colapsado, con los consiguientes problemas sociales. Una posible respuesta es el sindicalismo comunitario –la comunidad local financia y concede crédito para la producción industrial, combinándolo con medidas democráticas de propiedad de los trabajadores y de control de la producción–. Así, se lograría aumentar la inversión directa en producción, mantener puestos de trabajo en los centros de población existentes, promover la mejora de las competencias de empleo, y aumentar los impuestos destinados a servicios locales y a apoyar a empresas locales. Al mismo tiempo, se aumenta el apoyo a una democracia política real, haciendo que resulte superflua la ideología explotadora de la distinción entre público/privado. El freno de la deslocalización del trabajo puede reducir la tendencia global de pérdida de la calidad del empleo y las diferencias salariales. Ambos problemas dificultan la vuelta a la producción de valor, y aumentan la diferencia salarial, deteriorando los sueldos sociales y el bienestar en todo el mundo. El sindicalismo comunitario puede servir como objetivo moral de un modelo alternativo de producción, centrado en los incentivos para lograr a largo plazo estabilidad laboral y base económica para la comunidad. DOWNLOAD THIS PAPER FROM SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2056256

This article reads the ambivalence of the doubles that populate Martin Amis' novel Money through the doubles that money itself possesses: specifically the divergence between what have come to be thought of as financial and industrial forms of capital. The form of Amis' novel, I suggest, offers itself as a metaphorical critique of these divided forms, one that seeks to interrupt the deferred logic that has constructed what he has described as money's ‘tacit conspiracy’. Amis's novel can thus be read as an intervention in the very logic that has prevented the disastrous implications of finance capitalism's ascendancy from being realised.

This paper is concerned essentially with the question of how does financial globalization affect economic welfare? Orthodox theory suggests that because of the greater risk-sharing between countries that financial liberalization entails, there should be no welfare losses. Greater risk-sharing should lead to greater smoothing of consumption and/or growth trajectories for developing countries. Yet there is widespread evidence of crises following liberalization. Apart from these international macro-economic issues, it is argued here that financial globalization changes the very nature of capitalism from managerial to finance capitalism. This profoundly affects at the micro-economic level corporate governance, corporate finance and income distribution. Both macro-economic and micro-economic factors outlined here influence human development.

Using concepts of social formation and policy regime, the article examines the role of neoliberalism in creating finance capitalism. Finance capitalism involves new methods of exploitation in the reproduction sphere, through debt, price gouging etc. The paper argues that governments are integral components of finance capitalism. 'Austerity measures' are finance capitalism's method of disciplining reluctant classes and regions. A case study of the deficit crisis in the USA shows that austerity measures are the only permissible policy discourse, whereas the cause of the deficit is non-progressive taxation. The paper concludes that inequality is not only unethical but also it is economically disastrous. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

The world's worst economic crisis since the 1930s is now well into its third year. All sorts of explanations have been proffered for the causes of the crisis, from lax regulation and oversight to excessive global liquidity. Unfortunately, these narratives do not take into account the systemic nature of the global crisis. This is why so many observers are misled into pronouncing that recovery is on the way-or even under way already. I believe they are incorrect. We are, perhaps, in round three of a nine-round bout. It is still conceivable that Minsky's "it"-a full-fledged debt deflation with failure of most of the largest financial institutions-could happen again. Indeed, Minsky's work has enjoyed unprecedented interest, with many calling this a "Minsky moment" or "Minsky crisis." However, most of those who channel Minsky locate the beginnings of the crisis in the 2000s. I argue that we should not view this as a "moment" that can be traced to recent developments. Rather, as Minsky argued for nearly 50 years, we have seen a slow realignment of the global financial system toward "money manager capitalism." Minsky's analysis correctly links postwar developments with the prewar "finance capitalism" analyzed by Rudolf Hilferding, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes-and later by John Kenneth Galbraith. In an important sense, over the past quarter century we created conditions similar to those that existed in the run-up to the Great Depression, with a similar outcome. Getting out of this mess will require radical policy changes no less significant than those adopted in the New Deal.

She quotes the head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow operation as stating that ‘Our world is broken— and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it’. What a difference a few years make! The crisis of finance capitalism has turned into the fiscal crisis of the state. Having rescued the banks through the provision of millions of dollars worth of state funding, governments have found themselves facing a crisis in their budgets that comes directly from the crisis, the rescues and their impact on revenues and expenditures. The result, Organization 18(2) 147–152 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1350508410392397 org.sagepub.com

Starting in the 1980s and 1990s, in various European welfare reforms, parts of the social insurance systems and the related resources were transferred to the financial market. In this sense, one can speak of privatisation and marketisation, both examples of a neo-liberal tendency. Now, after ‘the Fall of Finance Capitalism’, it is often stated that ‘the years of neoliberal triumph have come to an end’. This paper argues that there had already been a contrasting and powerful development previously, which might now be reinforced. This political and institutional development was moving towards extensive regulatory policies, in particular after the stock market crisis in 2001, and towards solidarity, two examples of a neo-etatistic tendency. I argue that the traditional exclusionary categorisation significantly underestimates the continuously changing mix. I will introduce a more complex approach which will be much more helpful to comprehend current developments in pension protection, and which might...

The “party paradox” thesis claims that in the context of the legal corporate governance reforms of the 1990s, which aimed at adjusting national corporate governance systems to the “finance capitalism” of the Anglo-American type, center-left parties promoted proshareholder corporate governance reforms, whereas center-right parties opposed such reforms. Based on case studies of Switzerland, Sweden, and the Netherlands, this article shows that this thesis does not apply to two of these cases: In Sweden and the Netherlands a broad coalition uniting center-right and center-left parties opposed— with considerable success—proshareholder reforms. Therefore, the author argues that firm-level explanations of the “party paradox” are insufficient to understand the variance in center-left preferences across different cases. Instead, the historical role of labor in different countries is critical in the formation of center-left preferences. Where labor was not excluded from the formation of corporate governance structures, center-left support for proshareholder reform was weak.

Capitalism evolves through stages that differ in institutional structure and policy regime. Finance is crucial to understanding an economic system but other institutional factors are important too. This paper compares finance capitalism with money manager capitalism on the basis of a number of features. Despite the fact that these two stages represent unique periods of evolution, the paper shows that these two stages of capitalism are much alike. This suggests that the current period's financial instability should be expected, and that public policy measures meant to address financial crisis may have to resemble those of the midtwentieth century Keynesian period.

Regulatory and governance studies help locate power and responsibility in the global financial crisis. I argue that corporate and state power worked together in centers like New York and London to shape regulation and that power was spread around the world. In the response to the crisis, responsibility for regulation will remain largely systems-based rather than centrally directed. However, those systems should be located in the culture of the elites, which are socially and spatially based, as much as in the economics of the markets or the cognition of the firms. And that responsibility has limits, so there should be greater democratic control of finance and less dependence on finance capitalism for essential services, social security, and environment protection.