The Centrality of Finance

Abstract

In the contemporary conjuncture financialization is driving a fundamental reorganization of American capitalism and increasingly that of other economies significantly impacting the trajectory of the world-system. This paper interrogates the nature and extent of financialization, the ways it is adding to systemic risk with attention to the future of the dollar, and implications for the relationship between USbased finance and new emerging centers of the world-system.

Asset Bubbles, Debt Deflation, and Global Imbalances

“…The concept of finance-led capitalism, together with the concept of financialization, indicating the disproportionately rapid expansion of financial assets (and liabilities) relative to other assets, has recently become an accepted characterization of contemporary capitalism in heterodox economic theory. This holds for France's "Regulationists" (Aglietta 1998;Aglietta and Rebérioux 2004;Boyer 2000) just as much as it does for post-Keynesians (Hein and Van Treeck 2007;Lavoie 2007;Stockhammer 2004Stockhammer , 2006Stockhammer , 2007 or America's Union for Radical Political Economics radicals (Epstein 2005;Foster 2007;Krippner 2005;Palley 2007;Tabb 2007).…”

The geographies of the institutional and industrial constraints on the financialization of German brewing

“…Central to this perspective is explaining how traditionally non-financial firms are 'increasingly beholden to the logic of finance' (Hall, 2011: 3) and remain sensitive to the demands of financial interests (Williams, 2000). Firm-level or corporate financialization studies (Aalbers, 2017) have explored these foundational concerns through the rise of shareholder value (Lazonick and O'Sullivan, 2000;Van Treeck, 2009;Wissoker, 2016), heightened forms of financialized competition (Williams, 2000;Tabb, 2007), growing short-termism (Dodig et al, 2015;Watt and Galgoczi, 2009) and transformations resulting from firms operating 'with an eye constantly on the stock market' (Lapavitsas, 2008: 25).…”