Financialization and Macroeconomics. The Impact on Social Welfare in Advanced Economies
By Giovanni Scarano
December 2022
London, Routledge
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003223221
214 pp.
Webpage
Financialisation has become a widely discussed and debated term leading to a plurality of perspectives, but no fixed definition or single reading. This book presents a critical exploration and review of the current literature on financialisation, focusing on the financialisation of NFCs and its possible implications for the macroeconomic and financial stability of advanced countries.
Starting from this critical analysis, it proposes some new readings of the process of financialisation, linking it directly, on the one hand, to the evolution of interest-bearing capital and the credit system, and, on the other hand, to the historical tendencies of monopoly capital towards financial arrangements to manage corporate control. Finally, a conceptual scheme for interpretation and a mathematical model of corporate portfolio choice is developed to explain how the tendency in developed countries to place growing shares of social surplus in speculative financial channels can contribute to their long-term real stagnation. The book also underlines the excessive attention usually being paid to some micro-epiphenomena that show a fallacy of composition at the macroeconomic level and can lead to some misunderstandings of the general trends in capitalist evolution. Moreover, some doubts are raised about the extent to which financialisation actually represents a change to the present regime of accumulation.
The book targets all the scholars who are interested in better understanding whether financialisation constitutes a profound change in the functioning of capitalist economic systems and what effects it can produce in social welfare in the advanced countries.
Table of contents
Introduction
Post-Keynesian approaches
The French Regulation School and the Social Structures of Accumulation Approach
Classical Marxist approaches
Interest-bearing capital vs industrial capital
Financial rentiers and the revenant conflict between rent and profit
Corporate saving glut and liquidity holding
Financialisation of NFCs, globalisation and growth
Conclusion
Mario Cedrini