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The article sets out the historical development of the economy of so- cial science intended to exact science, forgetting his ethos, the man. Notice the difference between growth and development, and how it is concentrated in a few countries, leaving huge populations in the backward condition. Highlights the efforts made by the international community after World War II. The creation of the UN declaration of Human Rights, based on the pillar of dignity and solidarity programs such as the Marshall Plan, seeking to redistribute the advances that create productive wealth. Highlight the worsening inequality in the wake of globalization and the rule of finance capitalism, facilitated by technological advances it constitutes the economy of indignity that generates feelings of indignation and protest. After referring to recent historical approaches to the theory of economic development, pro- poses to use the same advances in technology, coupled with the con- cept of solidarity and development of human talent, from the physical space, time and cyberspace, to generate the Economics of Dignity, which is to prevail humans and respect for nature, beginning with vital resources such as water, and few today being privatized.

A distinctive feature of Marxist method is that analysis of ideas and theories go hand in hand with social relations that produce them. The encounter between Critical Realism and Historical Materialism needs to be located in the transformations of capitalism into transnational monopoly finance capitalism in the beginning of the 20th century, a change that Lenin referred to as a new ‘epoch’. The trajectory of Marxism is also subject to historical materialist methods of analysis. Not taking a historical materialist approach to developments within Marxism renders Marxism into an ideology rather than a living guide to emancipatory political action.

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.

This essay examines the legacy of the late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frias. Shortly after the death of President Chávez, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected the 266th and current pope of the Catholic Church and took the name, Francis. The essay contrasts the demonization of Hugo Chávez by the Western corporate media with the adulation of the newly elected Pope. The author recounts his work in Venezuela building socialism as part of the Bolivarian Revolution initiated by the Chávez government. The Bolivarian Revolution has been a powerful challenge to the catastrophe of finance capitalism and has helped Venezuela's poor tremendously. The author then discusses the traditional role of the Catholic Church in Latin America to protect the class of wealth and property. He notes the controversy surrounding the role Pope Francis played during the days of the military dictatorship in Argentina where the Pope was serving as a bishop of the Church. Some reason to be optimistic about the new pope is contained in the view of liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, and the author ends his commentary with this note of optimism. Chávez's legacy, however, is already assured, at least among the poor and the powerless of Las Americas, who will continue to revere him as a popular saint.

The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.- James Joyce, UlyssesWe are like a dish of loose sand.- Lu Xun, Selected WorksIn tandem with the renewed interest in world literature and global comparativism, contemporary modernist studies has become much more visibly invested in reconfiguring its archive under new spatial and temporal modalities. The new modernist studies constitutes its analytical framework in the expanded field of twentieth-century cultural globalization and calls for reexamining the historical conjuncture of modernism prior to its co-optation into the triumphant discourse of the North Atlantic bloc, where a particular strand of aesthetic experimentation was codified into an inventory of universal hegemonic techniques.1 Similar to the eventual bankruptcy of the modernization theory in area studies, the North Atlantic ideology of modernism has lost its sustainability in explaining other modernist situations, such as African negritude, Brazilian anthropofagia, Greek ellinikptita, Arab hadatha, and so on, where notions such as elite, tradition, and popularity assume different codings.2 To conceptualize these differences through tropes of derivation or of exception is to be trapped in the binary of innovative centers and imitative peripheries. Drawing more expansive maps of the modern, the new trajectories have challenged the foundational tenets of the classic accounts of modernism by enlarging the scope to include racially, sexually, and geographically marginal(ized) works and authors, as well as nascent methodologies in cultural history and literary criticism.3 The new modernist studies aims in particular at the rerouting of modernity through a set of alternative texts and traditions that might initially appear outside official borders of the unarticulated, yet powerful cartographic paradigm. These modulations around the times, spaces, and agents of modernism have certainly led to a greater recognition of its multiplicity.4 Speculatively speaking, Matei Calinescu's groundbreaking work, Five Faces of Modernity (1987), now has to be rewritten as "A Thousand Faces of Modernity."Even so, the concept of global modernism may still run the risk of producing a diffusionist model in which modernism is taken as the standard measure for what Pascale Casanova calls the "Greenwich meridian time" of the world literary space and the privileged aesthetic mandate for entering the literary present.5 Rather than focusing on how modernism travels the globe or can be found in different parts of the world, in this essay I want to propose an interpretive framework that situates different constellations of modernism in relation to how they mediate a phenomenology of globality through subjective affects of the historically determined transformations in everyday common life.6 I locate the formation of twentieth-century modernisms in a globally dispersed process that I call plebeianization - a concept that refers to the dissolution and reconstitution of former traditional forms of subjectivity (that were expressed in terms of various status designations and social polarities such as urban-rural, bourgeois - peasant, metropolitan - colonial, entrepreneurlaborer, and so on) in the broadened social basis of modern culture. To rephrase Marx's famous maxim, all solid forms of subjecthood melt into air. This is not to say that these subject positions cease to exist. Rather, they lose their presumed stability under the mobilizing kinetics of imperialist/finance capitalism and are inflected by new national, class, racial, and geopolitical situations.At this juncture, it is necessary to note the dialectical double bind of this transformation. On the one hand, plebeianization describes a destructive process that violently opens up the lifeworld of the common individual to capitalism. The plebeian, in my special usage, refers to this mode of subjectivity that becomes increasingly vulnerable to, and more immediately impacted by, the penetration of the global system in everyday life. …

To specif against London is no longer fashionable. The Earth as an artistic cult has had its day, and the literature of the near future will probably ignore the country and see\ inspiration from the town. Of Pan and the elemental forces, the public has heard a little too much-they seem Victorian, while London is Georgian-and those who care for the earth with sincerity may wait long ere the pendulum swings bac\ to her again.-E. M. Forster, Howards End ( 1910)1In The Country and City (1973), Raymond Williams notes the peculiar slowness with which British literature came to appreciate the urban: "[E]ven after society was predominantly urban its literature, for a generation, was still predominantly rural."2 As the passage foregoing from Howards End suggests, the generation for whom British literature came to embrace London is that of E. M. Forster and H. G. Wells. Published within a year of each other, Forsters Howards End and Wells's Tono-Bungay (1909) read like sibling foils. They both take the "fashionable" turn toward London identified by Forster as the motivation for their plots, and reading these two novels together provides an opportunity to explore why British literature at this particular historical moment becomes urbanized. The passage from Howards End attributes the turn toward London to popular opinion-"the public has heard a little too much" about the country and is ready to embrace the city. However, the novel as a whole makes a much more compelling argument about why the reading public may find itself more interested in London than in times past. If Howards End and TonoBungay share a fascination with London's growing influence in popular opinion and literary production, they also share a common explanation for why London is enjoying this newfound attention: namely, finance capitalism.Tono-Bungay, which tells the story of the rise and fall of a financial empire, explicitly links the cultural turn toward London to finance capitalism. But this nexus is less apparent in Forsters novel. It becomes clear that Howards End is also a novel about finance only when read through the lens of Giovanni Arrighi's groundbreaking theory of finance capitalism, The Long Twentieth Century (1994). Literary scholars who have made use of Arrighi's work tend to do so by exploring how financial modes of producing value differ from modes of value production under industrial capitalism-finance capital is more abstract, free-floating, and volatile- and how that kind of value production may find its cultural corollaries in art, literature, and epistemology.3 Like these scholars, Tono-Bungay % interest in finance capitalism is focused on the peculiar means by which value accumulates (or does not accumulate) through financial modes of value production, and for this reason the link between London and finance capital is readily apparent in that novel. However, in Arrighi's theory, finance capitalism is more than a form of value production; it is a multidimensional historical process. Arrighi's theory, then, offers a new framework for historicizing cultural production and provides a means of understanding how Howards End can also be read as a novel about finance capitalism.Taken together, these novels, because they are both about a historical shift in popular and literary attitudes toward London and about the historical processes of finance capitalism, further invite an investigation into the relationship among London, finance capitalism, and the formal experimentation that characterizes modernist literature. Appearing just a few years before the heady days of what we tend to call modernism proper-when, in Virginia Woolf s words, "the smashing and crashing" of conventional forms began in earnest4-Howards End and Tono-Bungay have long been recognized as transitional novels between the Victorian and modernist periods.5 In terms of structure, both novels are rather conservative and Victorian, but, as I will discuss, they both articulate an awareness of how conventional novelistic poetics are no longer adequate to the modern world they seek to represent. …

In this essay, Foucault's concept “of other spaces” – or, heterotopia – is used to examine the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in the context of systemic crisis. Neoliberalism is marked by innovations that amplify and accelerate contradictions, unfolding the false utopia of finance capitalism. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) helped hyper-financialize the economy, enrich banksters and extend inequalities. Conversely, high-tech developments allow for decentralized decision-making and more direct democracy, paralleling the ethics of OWS. New ICTs compress TimeSpace, opening doors for empathic connections, generating conditions for elevation of collective superstructural consciousness. This paper explores how these conditions create – and are recreated by – heterotopic spaces. Drawing on Foucault's method of heterotopology we throw light on the potential of OWS to prefigure another world, analyzing endeavors to promote cooperative autonomy, and raise consciousness in and through mediated environments, always contested, ever in flux, and inevitably over-(but never pre-)determined.

This contribution discusses the return of the ‘social question’ to the basically still wealthy and secure societies of the Global North. Referring to the case of German welfare capitalism, a historically new form of discriminating precariousness is being identified. This type of precariousness results from processes of a market driven, capitalist Landnahme. The paper argues that this specific form of precariousness should be the subject matter of a renewed, scientific social critique.

The 2008 financial crisis initially appeared to challenge the sustainability of neoliberal finance capitalism. However, the focus of political and public debate soon shifted to state spending and the need for austerity. This research examines how this shift took place in the British press during 2009. The article begins by charting the rise of neoliberalism and its role in financializing the economy. It then examines how such developments impacted news production and made neoliberal perspectives more prominent in the media. This meant, as the data in this article demonstrate, that the key definers of the crisis in the media were among the strongest advocates of neoliberalism. Reporting of the deficit was characterized by fear appeals, the presentation of misleading data and false comparisons. Finally the article notes the consistent endorsement of austerity measures, by almost all newspapers, despite their consistent history of policy failure during recessions.

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.

Resumo Este trabalho tem o propósito de discutir, de maneira ampla, a crise do capitalismo contemporâneo. Além de debater, no campo teórico, as interpretações da crise, com o objetivo de apresentar nossas perspectivas, procura, também, discutir de modo mais estrutural o papel do Estado nessa crise e como ele tem sido central e funcional na administração política do capitalismo financeirizado, com fortes implicações para o processo em andamento do que chamamos de despatrimonialização social. Ademais, dedica parte da análise ao caso do Brasil, visto que o país, de certa maneira, está inserido no processo de produção e tem um protagonismo econômico em escala mundial. No fim, são feitas algumas considerações sobre nossas possibilidades futuras. Se o que estamos fazendo não interessa à maioria e precisa mudar, também não temos qualquer preparo para propor ou fazer as mudanças por meio revolucionário - conforme a proposta de David Harvey; com isso, a construção de um projeto para o nosso futuro pode ser o caminho mais adequado no momento. Resumen Este trabajo tiene el propósito de discutir, con amplitud, la crisis del capitalismo contemporáneo. Más allá de discutir en el campo teórico las interpretaciones de la crisis, con el objetivo de presentar nuestros puntos de vista, busca también debatir de forma más estructural el rol del Estado en esa crisis y su papel principal y funcional en la administración política del capitalismo financiero, con fuertes implicaciones para el proceso en progreso de lo que llamamos despatrimonialización social. Además parte del análisis se dedica al caso de Brasil, ya que el país, de cierta manera, está insertado en el proceso de producción y tiene protagonismo económico a escala mundial. Al final del trabajo se hacen algunas consideraciones sobre nuestras posibilidades futuras. Si lo que estamos haciendo no interesa a la mayoría y necesita cambiar, también no tenemos ninguna preparación para proponer o hacer los cambios por el medio revolucionario - de acuerdo con la propuesta de David Harvey; con eso la construcción de un proyecto para nuestro futuro puede ser el camino más adecuado en este momento. Abstract This paper aims to promote a broad discussion of the crisis in contemporary capitalism. Besides debating, in the theoretical field, interpretations of the crisis, with the purpose of introducing our perspectives, it also seeks to discuss in a more structural way the State's role in this crisis and how central and functional it has been in the political administration of finance capitalism, with strong implications for the ongoing process of what we call social deconstruction of property. Moreover, a part of the analysis is devoted to Brazil, as the country is, in a way, inserted in the production process, and plays a major role in the global arena. In the end, some considerations about our prospects are drawn. If what we are doing does not matter to most people, and there is a need for change, we are also not prepared to propose or provide changes by a revolutionary way - as is proposed by David Harvey; thus, the construction of a project for our future may be the most appropriate solution at the moment.

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.

Neoliberalization is a distinctive economic, political, and social project that promotes profit-oriented, market-mediated accumulation as the primary axis of societalization. This might suggest that neoliberalism promotes the primacy of the economic but, since its extension and reproduction require continuing state support and, indeed, involve what Weber called political capitalism, one might also argue that it entails a primacy of the political. To address this paradox, my article offers a baseline definition of neoliberalism and identifies four ideal-typical historical forms thereof; relates neoliberalism to the world market, geopolitics and global governance; disambiguates the primacy of the economic; and addresses the role of the political in promoting neoliberalism and handling its contradictions and crisis-tendencies. It illustrates this exercise in critical theory from the North Atlantic Financial Crisis and how its (mis)management has strengthened the neoliberal project, enabled its main promoters and beneficiaries to escape the need to learn from their mistakes, and even enabled them to further enrich themselves.

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

Our purpose in this article is to relate the real movements in the economy during 2008 to the ‘image-work’ of financial institutions. Over the period January—December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of advertisements for themes and evocative images provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the global financial crisis unfolded. In using the term ‘phantasmagoria’ we move beyond its colloquial sense of a set of strange images designed to dazzle towards the more technical connotation used by Rancière (2004) who suggested that words and images can offer a trace of an overall determining set-up if they are torn from their obviousness so they become phantasmagoric figures. The key phantasmagoric figure we identify here is that of the financial institution as timeless, immortal and unchanging; a coherent and autonomous entity amongst other actors. This notion of uniqueness belies the commonality of thinking which precipitated the global financial crisis as well as the limited capacity for control of financial institutions in relation to market events. It also functions as a powerful naturalizing force, making it hard to question certain aspects of the recent period of ‘capitalism in crisis’.

La crisis global actual y las respuestas que los países avanzados han otorgado, ha tenido un “efecto colateral” inesperado para el mundo estudioso de la economía: revivir las obras de autores clásicos que parecían estar confinados al olvido. Así ha ocurrido, por citar los más prominentes, con las teorías sobre la crisis de Carlos Marx, las políticas anticíclicas de John Maynard Keynes y el capital financiero de Rudolf Hilferding. Este artículo trata de analizar y revalorizar el aporte de este último a 100 años de su obra trascendental. Como un homenaje a la obra de Hilferding, en este artículo se plantea la necesidad de redefinir el moderno poder del capital financiero como un desafío teórico y metodológico.

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...

Why do some countries rely more heavily on equities markets, while others depend more on commercial banking? Analyses of the origins of contemporary capitalist institutions usually look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, this paper demonstrates that financial institutions – regarded as central to the way capitalist systems are organised – changed radically in the mid-twentieth century in many countries. This paper argues that government partisanship in formative moments of institutional (re)creation can better account for their modern manifestation than prominent alternative explanations. A new measure of partisanship that is sensitive to these institutional transformations is presented. Case studies on Germany and France offer evidence consistent with this argument.

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.

In this updated and revised version of his 2008 Society for Business Ethics presidential address, Richard Nielsen documents the characteristics and extent of the 2007–2009 economic crisis and analyzes how the ethics issues of the economic crisis are structurally related to a relatively new form of capitalism, high-leverage finance capitalism. Four types of high-leverage finance capitalism are considered: hedge funds; private equity-leveraged buyouts; high-leverage, subprime mortgage banking; and high-leverage banking. The structurally related problems with the four types of high-leverage finance capitalism converged in something of a perfect economic storm. Explanations for the crisis are offered in the context of the type of the high-leverage finance capitalism system that permitted and facilitated the economic crisis. Ethics issues and potential reforms are considered that may be able to mitigate the destructive effects of what Schumpeter referred to as the “creative destructive” effects of evolutionary forms of capitalism while realizing the Aristotelian economic ideal of creating wealth in such a way as to make us better people and the world a better place.

An emergent discourse in contemporary Catalonia has linked economic liberalism and the project to constitute an independent state. By examining the journalistic texts of economist Xavier Sala i Martin and executive Xavier Roig, I show how this discourse reacts against two main and closely related phenomena: first, the fact that the restoration of the Generalitat after Francoism has entailed the statalization of Catalan civil society; and, second, the vanishing of the «entrepreneurial Catalan» as a central figure of the collective imaginary. My paper argues that the statalization of civil society and the devalorization of work are not conjunctural phenomena specific to Catalonia but structural tendencies of finance capitalism. To illustrate this point, I analyze Jordi Galceran's play El metode Gronholm, in which the main character, Ferran Auge, is the perfect expression of the contradiction between the «entrepreneurial Catalan» and multinational capitalism. I further argue that liberalism cannot contest these structural tendencies; on the contrary, these are the consequence of the fusion of the state and the market that is essential to neoliberal capitalism. In this respect, the separatism of this liberal discourse emerges as the desire that Catalonia can fully participate in the interstate competition for global capital.

A reader first encountering Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (1912) (1) might find it curious that a novel that so closely tracks a series of shady financial deals appears at the same time as a tribute to the historical rise of finance capitalism. The financier in question, Frank Cowperwood, attains wealth and prominence in Philadelphia in the late 1860s, is ruined during the financial panic of 1871, and is tried and convicted for a scheme in which he borrows money in an attempt to save his business. After his release from prison, Cowperwood exploits the great panic of 1873 to recover his fortune and triumph over the rivals who had sought to destroy him. In this final turn of events, the text's de-emphasis of moral accountability is perhaps most striking; the drama of Cowperwood's "great hour" appears fully at odds with a negative judgment on his amorality or opportunism. That the financier achieves his greatest strength at a moment of widespread economic ruin might suggest that the text shares the age's deep ambivalence about financial titans, reflecting what historian Steve Fraser calls the characteristically American fascination with and profound mistrust of Wall Street. And, indeed, although Dreiser is certainly clear-eyed about the risks of financial expansion--the concentration of economic power into fewer hands, and the ability of business to outpace the law--his sweeping descriptions of historical events tend to read less as social critique than as paeans to the massive new opportunities of the period and to the exceptional individuals who realize them. Yet even in its embrace of such contradictions, I wish to argue, the text produces not a historical ambivalence about the rise of the financier but a formal ambivalence in the novel's account of historical change. In the formal intimacy of the text's financial descriptions is to be found perhaps the most sensitive register of historical tremors, where fissures of opportunity are constantly being opened and closed by the movement of history, and where the details of what is possible, from a pragmatist's standpoint, produce expectations for the material shape of the future. The financier's operations both embrace and refute a progressivist view of history, revealing the tension in the novel between the "natural" system of capitalism and the role of capitalism's historical agent--such as he is. The text's argument over the randomness of events versus the evolutionary trajectory of history is hardly an inconsistency: in accommodating order and disorder, progression and disruption at the same time, Dreiser's account of history corresponds to the views of many scientific historians and economic writers of the period. (2) But more to the point, it becomes the source of one of the text's most productive interrogations: the question of what capital can or cannot do in particular historical circumstances. With this approach, it becomes possible to see the text as not simply "borrowing" from biographical history to explain the financier, nor treating as this figure as a self-sufficient explanation of history, but instead as using the emergence of the financier to negotiate between competing models of history. Donald Pizer's observation that the historical narrative in the Cowperwood trilogy feels "forced" (7) might lead some to question what does not feel forced in a long and unwieldy narrative that, in its attention to the details of financial transactions, is certainly unequalled in American literary realism. The extensive descriptions in The Financier (Howard Horwitz calls them "transcriptive" [201]) together with Dreiser's commentary about the nation's post-Civil War economic and geographical growth (he even notes historical milestones that the country has not yet passed), have been viewed as examples of the text's unsuccessful integration of aesthetic and historical concerns. Recent analyses have attended in particular to the novel's awkwardly alternating plot structure, its excess of financial detail, and its heavy-handed metaphors of strength and weakness, using such formal deficiencies as a lens into the text's governing systems of value and representation. …

Recent reforms of corporate governance law and related litigation rules in the US and in Germany indicate that reports of the spread of adversarial legalism are greatly exaggerated. Politics and legislation in the US since the mid-1990s have turned quite decisively against shareholder litigation even as corporate governance and securities law reforms have expanded the role and scope of the regulatory state. Germany's extraordinary expansion of financial and corporate governance regulation since the early 1990s exemplifies juridification. Although these reforms included some liberalization of shareholder litigation rules, the changes reflected skepticism towards private litigation and imposed new constraints on the most prevalent forms of shareholder suits. Marketization of economic relations and the era of finance capitalism have produced far more legalism than adversarialism, more regulation than judicialization, and more ex ante transparency rules than ex post litigation remedies. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

This paper uses the financial and economic downturn widely dated back to summer 2007 to develop understandings of financial elites in London's international financial district. Drawing on empirical research conducted into fee earning investment bankers and social scientific research into elites and power relations, I focus on the different modalities of power associated with the changing nature of these ‘financialised elites’. I argue that in contrast to earlier generations of financiers, the power of contemporary investment bankers emerges through their role choreographing transnational networks of financial actors associated with securitised and structured products rather than being purely read off their social or education background. I suggest that these networked forms of power relation are significant because, on the one hand, they have prevented investment bankers distancing themselves from the ongoing turbulence and uncertainty within the international financial system. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the ability of investment bankers to (re)produce such networks indicates that suggestions of the demise of ‘financialised elites’ in the wake of the global credit crunch may be too hasty as previous financial crises demonstrate the considerable ability of ‘financialised elites’ to seize moments of conjunctural opportunity to reinvent themselves through new financial products and organisations.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to set out the role of banking in a binary and Islamic economy.Design/methodology/approachBy comparison, the paper shows that the main requirements for such an economy, although superficially similar, differ from the realities of “free market” finance capitalism. The paper goes on to explain how, in a binary and Islamic economy, commercial banks would be the means by which interest‐free loans, coming from the central bank and ummah and directed at various forms of productive capacity, would be introduced.FindingsThere is no difficulty in using the banking system to introduce the binary and Islamic economy. However, a paradigm issue is involved.Practical implicationsThe central bank‐issued interest‐free loans implemented through the commercial banking system loans serve the ends of both binary and Islamic economics in that they enhance the real economy and forward social and economic justice.Originality/valueThe paper shows how use of these loans is a new concept with a power to change the whole of the economy and society in a beneficial way.

The concept of freedom promoted under neo-liberal capitalism is not the invention of neo-liberal ideologues, but rather a class-specific interpretation that has been maintained and promoted for more than three centuries. It is rooted in classical liberal thinking, according to which individual freedom is largely a measure of the capacity of investors to control property and labour power. In this liberal tradition the pursuit of freedom has been associated with the removal of obstacles inhibiting the extraction of surplus value. Related principles, theories and arguments have functioned to depict the ‘freedom of capital’ as the ‘freedom of the individual’. This article shows that neo-liberal thought is playing a similar role in the 21st century, but that its current expression (aided no end by the world's experience of Stalinism) is at least partly shaped according to the needs of industrial and finance capitalism.

We are in the midst of a global financial crisis accompanied by a deep and probably long-lasting economic downturn; indeed, some analysts are already calling this the first depression of the post-World War II era. In this article, I argue that this is a systemic crisis--a crisis of what Hyman Minsky called money manager capitalism. I link this to the analyses of Hilferding and Veblen of an earlier period, finance capitalism, and argue that this is, in effect, the second failure of this type of capitalism. The essential characteristics of early finance capitalism are: relatively small government, use of external finance for investment, and growing concentration of economic power in the hands of 'trusts'--or what we might today call megacorporations with varied interests and diverse affiliations across 'industry', 'finance' and 'insurance'. Unlike the first phase, the second phase of finance capitalism took place in the context of a big government, neoconservative model. Minsky's analysis helps us to understand how the New Deal and big government created a paternalistic capitalism after World War II, which favoured high consumption, high employment, greater equality and financial stability; however, that stability was destabilising because it permitted the rise of managed money. Over time, innovation and deregulation increased fragility, which generated increasingly frequent and severe financial crises. While previous crises were resolved quickly enough to prevent 'it' (another debt deflation) from happening again, this crisis appears to be sufficiently severe that the very survival of money manager capitalism is thrown into question. The article examines the contributing factors to the current crisis, including the real estate boom and bust, the rise of risky financial instruments such as securitised debts and credit default swaps, the commodities market bubble and the fiscal squeeze. The article concludes with some suggestions concerning the possible outcome of the failure of this form of finance capitalism. Copyright The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Cambridge Political Economy Society. All rights reserved., Oxford University Press.

The role of highly skilled financiers in shaping the spatialities of financial systems has been widely studied by social scientists. However, comparatively less attention has been paid to the growing use of business education to (re)produce 'highly skilled' financiers throughout the career life-course. In response, in this article, we adopt a cultural economy approach to report on the use of business education by investment banks operating in London's; financial district. Whilst business education in general and MBA degrees in particular are often claimed to facilitate globally mobile economic elites, we argue that the assembling of financial expertise through business education also serves to territorially and societally embed financiers into particular regulatory regimes and organizational cultures. As a result, we suggest that business education represents an important, yet hitherto neglected, set of activities in understanding the continued geographical and organizational heterogeneity of elite financial labour markets. In so doing, we argue that a focus on financial business education demonstrates the value of cultural economy approaches to financial geography and research into the variegated nature of finance capitalism more generally.

This article explains how the private equity-leveraged buyout type of financial institution (PE-LBO) operates as a form of finance capitalism. PE-LBO capitalism is described and compared with other types of capitalism such as family business capitalism, managerial capitalism, and other forms of finance capitalism such as shareholder value capitalism. Ethical and social issues structurally related to the PE-LBO form are analyzed. Potential reforms and/or solutions are considered.

The article ‘A New Finance Capitalism?’ raises an important paradox. Institutional investors are growing in size and the concentration of their stakes gives them potential influence over managers. Yet we observe an unexpected absence of shareholder activism and voice on the part of institutional investors in contemporary America. Concentration occurs without commitment. This comment further explores some reasons why today's largest investors seem resigned to or even to benefit from their relative passivity and preference of exit over voice. These reasons include conflicts of interest, market failures, lack of organizational capabilities, use of informal voice, and dependence of markets for corporate control. Corporate governance scholars have surprisingly little evidence on these topics, which suggest an important agenda for future research.