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The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. Th ese phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. Th is trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. Th e extraction of financial profi ts directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Costas Lapavitsas charts the growth of the 'unstable, unequal and slow-growing' system of financialised capitalism that has taken root in mature economies over the past 40 years, and outlines initial steps to disentangling businesses, services, workers and households from its grasp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses various issues related to the transition and crisis in the Japanese financial system. The Japanese financial system has been in prolonged crisis throughout the 1990s. There is no single reason for these phenomena. Financial crises typically are complex events that express a variety of underlying contradictions and antagonisms of capitalist production and exchange. Important explanatory elements of the emergence of the Japanese financial "bubble" and of the especial difficulties of post-"bubble" restructuring, are to be found in the very process of financial deregulation attempted throughout the 1980s. This process arose spontaneously and it was not imposed from abroad. Still, deregulation began to influence the character of the Japanese financial system changing it from a bank-based, state-controlled structure aiming at the financing of industrial investment to a market-based, less-state-controlled structure characterized by the competitive profit maximization of financial institutions. In other words, from being a paradigmatic model of 'late developer' long-term industrial lending, the Japanese system began to move toward the market-based short-term lending Anglo-Saxon model.