The Dark Ages of Financialization

European Straits #9

Dear all,

Since the 2008 crisis, the public debate has been dominated by the role of finance in our economy. Colin Crouch has written about household debt as a substitution for the welfare state to sustain mass consumption. Clayton Christensen has denounced the distortions that the ‘doctrine of new finance’ has imposed on corporate innovation. More recently, in her acclaimed Makers and Takers, Rana Foroohar has called for tackling the issue of financialization “to ensure not only more sustainable growth, but more stable politics”.

The current domination of global finance can easily be reconciled with Carlota Perez’s model of technological revolutions. When a techno-economic paradigm enters a phase of exhaustion, it’s usually time for finance to retake the upper hand and try and make the most of legacy assets. This happened one century ago, when the post-Great War exhaustion of the age of steel and electricity coincided with the financial exuberance leading to the Stock Market Crash of 1…