Abstract

That financial markets play an increasingly important role in capitalist economies is beyond doubt. Today large firms often turn to bond markets rather than banks to finance their operations; and many banks focus on securitizing assets instead of investing in the traditional sense. Over recent decades the notion of financialization has been adopted by critically minded scholars seeking to relate these trends to problems such as declining economic productivity, rising inequality and heightened financial fragility (Stockhammer 2004; Alvarez 2015; Tridico and Pariboni 2018). While rival explanatory lenses have also been proposed (most notably, globalization and neoliberalism), financialization scholars see these problems as predictable symptoms of the increasing share of global economic income ending up in the pockets of financial actors since the 1970s.