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AbstractFinance is not something separate from society. It is neither a Marxian superstructure nor a monetarist veil, but rather the very substance of modern social relations, a web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe. Financial relationships are not about mediating something else on the 'real' side of the economy; they are the constitutive relationships of the whole system. Financial globalization and global financialization have produced a global Financial Society, hierarchical and inherently unstable. The problem confronting social analysts is not so much to find the social in the money grid - the money grid is already social - but rather to understand the dynamical operations of that grid on its own terms. This essay sketches the fundamental processes that produce and reproduce Financial Society - settlement and market-making - as an attempt to provide a realistic point of departure for any feasible project of reform.

The failure of exceptional monetary measures pursued in response to the financial crisis in advanced economies to achieve a strong recovery has created a widespread concern that these economies suffer from a chronic demand gap and face the prospect of stagnation. This paper reviews and discusses the alternative views on the causes of the slowdown in accumulation and growth and the policies implemented and proposed to deal with it. It is argued that growing inequality, notably the secular decline in the share of wages and financialization are the main factors. Neither spending booms driven by financial bubbles, nor exporting unemployment through trade provide sustainable solutions. It is necessary to rebalance capital and labour, restrain finance and assign a greater role to the public sector in aggregate demand management and income and wealth distribution. However, the dominant neoliberal ideology rules out such socially progressive and economically effective solutions. Consequently, stagnation is likely to remain the new normal in the years to come with governments attempting to reignite growth by creating credit and asset bubbles and/or trying to export unemployment through beggar-thy-neighbour macroeconomic, labour market, trade and exchange rate policies, thereby generating financial and economic instability and tensions in international economic relations with significant repercussions for emerging and developing economies.

Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders' social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

The financialization of capitalism has been marked by the sustained rise of financial profits. In the United States, financial profits as a proportion of total profits rose enormously from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, collapsed during 2007–09, and subsequently recovered, but without reaching previous heights. During this period, the trend of the average rate of profit has been largely flat. The relative rise of financial profits in spite of stagnant average profitability represents a theoretical and empirical conundrum. We will argue that the answer should be sought partly in financial expropriation, but also in public interest rates kept at extraordinarily low levels. In this light, the rise of financial profits represents a vast public subsidy to the financial system characteristic of financialization.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Based on Arrighi (1994), we empirically investigate whether financialization and militarization are mutually reinforcing phenomena in the US during the post-WW II period. Military spending during the 1950s and 1960s in the US, along with other external stimuli, such as a rising sales effort and expansion in finance, insurance, and real estate, counteracted the stagnation of the monopolistic stage of capitalism. Monopoly capital was transformed into finance monopoly capital as the intensity of financial capital increased during the late 1970s in response to stagnation. Considering alternative financialization variables commonly used in the literature and the profit rate in the financial sector, and using several parametric and non-parametric methods, we found a significant relationship between financialization and militarization in the US for 1949-2019. The findings show that the decline in the profit rates lead to a decline in military expenditure. The overall results suggest that the rise in financialization is parallel to the decline in the profit rates, leading to larger military expenditure in total, but with relatively smaller share in GDP.

Financialization is promoted by alliances of multilateral 'development' organisations, national governments, and owners and institutions of private capital. In the healthcare sector, the leveraging of private sources of finance is widely argued as necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 3 target of universal health coverage. Employing social science perspectives on financialization, we contend that this is a new phase of capital formation. We trace the antecedents, institutions, instruments and ideas that facilitated the penetration of private capital in this sector, and the emergence of new asset classes that distinguish it. We argue that this deepening of financialization represents a fundamental shift in the organizing principles for healthcare systems, with negative implications for health and equality.

This book explores the ways in which local governments in England reacted to the UK government's austerity measures after the 2008 crash. Andy Pike examines how local statecrafters act in a variety of realms, and questions the sustainability and resilience of the local state in the longer term.

Neoliberalism generated a mono culture which has a money base on world and the axis of the economy changed from real sector to finance sector. As a result, starting from 1978 Washington Consensus up to now, government socialism collapsed, instead with the help of few supranational companies "company socialism" is built. With 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism transformed into "government capitalism" and there has been a wealth transfer from public to a bunch of companies which cannot be overlooked to collapse through governments. As a result, the gainer is a small group who controls the global stocks and losers are wide public batches.KEY WORDS: neoliberalism, finance sector, government capitalism, company socialism, wealth transfer.