Search

Financialization is a systemic transformation of capitalism that has occurred during the last four decades. This paper shows that the concept of financialization originates in Marxist theory, though its meaning remains unclear. It then proposes a theory of financialization as rooted in the altered behaviour of the fundamental agents of capitalist accumulation, including non-financial corporations, banks and workers. Finance has reshaped the activities of all three, also resulting in new forms of profit. It follows that opposing financialization is a complex process that involves creating public financial institutions but also re-establishing public provision for workers across a broad range of activities. Financialization cannot be reversed without re-establishing the command of the social and collective over the private and individual for the modern era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financialisation of developed countries includes increased lending to individuals as well as adoption of investment banking by commercial banks, thus contributing directly to the crisis of 2007-9. Financialisation has acquired an international aspect since the 1990s, primarily through liberalised capital flows. In the 2000s international financialisation has resulted in net capital flows from developing to developed countries, thus imposing substantial costs on the former, while subsidising the USA as leading issuer of quasi-world-money. International financialisation has also spurred domestic financialisation in developing countries through development of bond markets and foreign bank entry. Developing countries have been drawn into the crisis as current accounts declined and short-term capital flows were reversed. [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.