The holy trinity of ideological concepts for the
modern capitalist age are neoliberalism, globalisation and financialisation. Of
these three concepts financialisation occupies a position akin to that of the
holy ghost, as the least understood and least discussed of the three.
Financialisation is a reality under modern capitalism. Marxists need to examine
how much it has changed capitalism, and how far the system remains
fundamentally the same. (For the role of neoliberalism in capitalist ideology
see https://communist.red/neoliberalism-dead.htm)
Marx typically analysed the behaviour of capitalist
firms producing a single product and involved in just one line of business,
such as textile spinning or weaving. He did so because, in his day, that is how
most firms worked. We’ve come a long way from that. Take the case of General
Electric – a typical, modern diversified firm. General Electric is a
conglomerate with a finger in all sorts of pies – though not, these days,
electricity. To quote ‘Forbes’ It’s a
“technology, media & financial services company, with products &
services ranging from aircraft engines, power generation, water processing
& security technology to medical imaging, business & consumer
financing, media content & industrial products.” Where’s the industrial
logic in that? There is none. So why diversify?
As a last resort neoclassical economists have
invoked the mysterious notion of synergy as a force for diversification, rather
like conjuring a rabbit from a hat. Synergy is said to mean that ‘two and two
can make five.’ As we shall see, the results of mergers have just as often
demonstrated that ‘two and two can make three.’
There is one theory of modern capitalism that can
attempt to explain diversification in the form of a pure conglomerate like GE.
That is the theory that treats the firm as a portfolio of assets. Portfolio
theory begins with the homely saying that ‘you shouldn’t put all your eggs in
one basket.’ Diversification is said to be about risk reduction.
The notion of reducing risk (rather than increasing
profit) hardly seems an adequate theorisation of the aggressive and predatory
irruption of big capital into new sectors in search of more and more surplus
value. A Marxist has no problem in perceiving the unifying theme in financial
services, aircraft engines, power generation, medical imaging and the media
within GE. They are all intended to make money.
GE’s market capitalisation comes to $279 billion.
Its sales are $172.6bn, profits $21.9bn and it has assets of $833.9bn. It
employs 327,000 workers. (All these figures were bigger at the turn of the
millennium. GE has had serious difficulties in recent years and the value of
its assets has been in decline.) In many ways General Electric is typical of
the biggest businesses of our age.
General Electric is in fact treated by top
management as a portfolio of financial assets which generate surplus value.
They don’t care whether they are making aircraft engines or security technology
as long as they make money. Modern capitalists take a purely financial view of
their firm’s operations. Not only that, they are increasingly intertwined with
and dominated by financial institutions, financial instruments and financial
considerations. This process is called financialisation. It’s been going on for
the last thirty years or so. It’s an ugly word. The reality behind it is not
pretty either.
What is
financialisation?
Others have noted this modern trend. Some writers,
in our view, have tried to put too much explanatory weight on the concept. For
now we will offer the fairly neutral definition offered by Wikipedia. “Financialisation may be defined as:
"the increasing dominance of the finance industry in the sum total of
economic activity, of financial controllers in the management of corporations,
of financial assets among total assets, of marketised securities and
particularly equities among financial assets, of the stock market as a market
for corporate control in determining corporate strategies…”
“More popularly, however, financialisation is
understood to mean the vastly expanded role of financial motives, financial
markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation
of domestic and international economies.”
This is not simply restating the view outlined by
Lenin in his book, ‘Imperialism, the
highest stage of capitalism’ (Progress Publishers, 1966) that capitalism in
its monopoly stage is dominated by or merges with finance capital. The
increasing importance of finance capital to modern capitalism remains a valid
insight to this day. But we have moved beyond the period where finance capital
simply battens itself upon the productive capitalist sector though it still
does so, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad the Sailor’s back. George Soros
has observed, “The size of the financial
sector is out of proportion to the rest of the economy. It has been growing
excessively…ending in this super-bubble of the last 25 years.”
Capitalism has evolved to the stage where all
management calculation is basically dominated by financial calculations. The
importance of productive activity has been completely dissolved in the modern
management mindset. In ‘The moral
consequences of economic growth’ (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) Benjamin M.
Friedman summed up his analysis of the changes that have taken place, “I have the sense that in many of these
firms the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic
activity.”
This is reflected in the background and training of
top management. Thirty years ago the manager of an engineering firm would
typically have come from an engineering background and would have a basic understanding
of the problems and possibilities afforded by the technology handled by the
firm. This is no longer considered necessary or desirable. Harvard Business
School has concentrated over the past thirty years in turning out managers who
have the mentality of accountants. They are completely unaware of the
technology the firm uses. All they see is a balance sheet. More and more top
managers have been trained as accountants or lawyers.
Money from
money?
Marx dealt with two forms of circulation. In an economy
of simple commodity production the commodity is exchanged for money only as a
means of acquiring commodity of a different kind. The commodity producer sells
in order to buy. Marx calls this the C – M – C circuit. He contrasts this with
the intention of a capitalist who starts with money and exchanges it fleetingly
for commodities (for instance means of production) only in order to end up with
a larger sum of money. He intends to transform money into capital. This is the
M – C – M’ circuit. Marx notes that the acquisition of commodities (even if
only for an instant) is regarded by the capitalist as a nuisance. The
capitalist’s ideal is to move from M – M’ without bothering with acquiring
commodities at all. This strikes us as absurd but it is this absurdity to which
capital aspires.
A new era?
A new era of capitalism was announced by Martin Wolf
in 2007 (The new capitalism: how
unfettered finance is fast reshaping the global economy. Financial Times
19.06.07
Wolf may be regarded as a guru of finance capital.
The article is exceptionally wide-ranging and well-informed. However it is
inevitably impressionistic and raises more questions than it resolves. Wolf is
no Marxist. He is a Commander of the British Empire. His last book was entitled
‘Why globalization works.’ As we will
see, he may be having second thoughts on that. We have certainly expressed our
reservations in the past at the way in which the phrase ‘globalisation’ has
been lazily bandied about to suggest the unfettered triumph of capitalist production
relations throughout the world. (See http://www.marxist.com/globalisation-imperialism-economy110406.htm)
We agree with Martin Wolf when he argues that there
is a new, or at least vastly more important, trend in modern capitalism. That
trend is financialisation.
“First, finance has
exploded. According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the ratio of global
financial assets to annual world output has soared from 109 per cent in 1980 to
316 per cent in 2005. In 2005, the global stock of core financial assets had
reached $140,000bn.”
This is true and important. But we need
to know why finance has exploded in modern capitalism. Wolf himself does not
have a complete explanation, though he associates its rise with neoliberalism
and globalisation.
“Second,
finance has become far more transactions-oriented. In 1980, bank deposits made
up 42 per cent of all financial securities. By 2005, this had fallen to 27 per
cent. The capital markets increasingly perform the intermediation functions of
the banking system. The latter, in turn, has shifted from commercial banking,
with its long-term lending to clients and durable relations with customers,
towards investment banking.”
Again this is new and true. The reason for the
present credit crunch is that banks no longer hang on to mortgages and other
assets, and just count the money as it comes in. As we now know they bundled
these assets on, including the toxic sub-prime mortgages, and passed these
exotic securities on all round the world.
The other side of this
game of passing the risk parcel is that innumerable financial intermediaries
have sprung up taking a cut – agency fees – for every transaction. This is what
Wolf calls financial intermediation – turning loans into securities.
The credit rating agencies such as Standard &
Poor did not put any difficulties in the way of this securitisation. The reason
is not hard to seek. Since they are actually employed by the financial
institutions that issue the securities, they do not scrutinise the risk as carefully as they might. They
know what side their bread is buttered on.
When
considering finance capital, we naturally think of borrowing and lending as the
principal activities and of interest as the ‘reward’ sought by finance capital.
In fact as transactions are bundled up and sold on, many intermediaries in the
financial sector make their main income from commissions on sales. In the 1987
film ‘Trading Places’ Eddie Murphy as a con man exchanges places with a trader
in futures as part of a bet between two billionaire brothers as to whether
heredity or environment is determinant in human behaviour. As they explain
their business to Murphy, he sums it up, “I get it. You guys are bookies, right?”
Traders in pork belly futures get their commission whether pork bellies go up
or down in price, just as bookies get their cut no matter which horse wins the
3.30 at Lingfield. Huge sums are made in the City and Canary Wharf in
activities that approximate to bookmaking.
Investment
banking is basically a matter of mobilising other people’s money and hurling it
at investment opportunities rather than the homely high street job of lending
money out on mortgage and taking in deposits most of us associate with banking.
"O brave new world, that hath
such people in it," as Miranda says in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’.
Derivatives
and fictitious capital
Wolf goes on, “Third,
a host of complex new financial products have been derived from traditional
bonds, equities, commodities and foreign exchange. Thus were born
‘derivatives’, of which options, futures and swaps are the best known.
According to the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, by the end of
2006 the outstanding value of interest rate swaps, currency swaps and interest
rate options had reached $286,000bn (about six times global gross product), up
from a mere $3,450bn in 1990. These derivatives have transformed the
opportunities for managing risk.”
Derivatives are so called because they are derived
from another transaction. For instance a future contract may be a contract to
buy a share in the wheat harvest of 2010. The crop, of course has not been
sown, so the buyer is making a bet as to whether there will be a good harvest
or not. Futures are contrasted to spot transactions, where the buyer takes
delivery of the commodity at the time of buying. Derivatives are a form of what
Marx called fictitious capital.
In the case of real capital, it is a real
productive resource that participates in the equalisation of the profit rate.
So the return is worked out on the capital invested. For fictitious capital it
is the other way round. “The formation of
a fictitious capital is called capitalisation. Every periodic income is
capitalised by calculating it on the basis of the average rate of interest, as
an income which would be realised by a capital loaned at this rate of interest.
For example, if the annual income is £100 and the rate of interest 5%, then the
£100 would represent the annual interest on £2,000, and the £2,000 is regarded
as the capital-value of the legal title of ownership on the £100 annually. For
the person who buys this title of ownership, the annual income of £100
represents indeed the interest on his capital invested at 5%. All connection with
the actual expansion process of capital is thus completely lost, and the
conception of capital as something with automatic self-expansion properties is
thereby strengthened.” (Capital Vol III Chapter 29p. 597 Penguin, 1981)
Fictitious capital generates pieces of paper that entitle
the bearer to an income stream. This revenue can only come from surplus value,
from the unpaid labour of the working class. Yet the capital is fictitious
because it’s just a piece of paper and hasn’t contributed a penny to the
development of the capitalist world’s productive power.
Does a capitalist care whether through spending
£1,000 he owns a share in a factory, a mass of real productive capital; or
whether he owns a piece of paper? In either case ownership provides him with a
steady income stream, a share of surplus value. And, in any case, a share in a
factory does not really cause its owner to perceive that they have ownership of
individual bricks and machine parts. So of course they don’t care. The
capitalist’s indifference between real and fictitious capital is the objective
basis in his cranium to calculate everything in money terms – in other words
for the evolution of the mentality that produces financialisation, that regards
all economic activities as simply profit opportunities to be assessed against
each other.
As for managing risk, the supposed justification
for this explosion of paper wealth, that has proved a cruel delusion. What this
‘globalisation’ of finance has achieved is a global spread of risk. It has turned
localised risk into
generalised systemic risk. Nice one!
Wolf continues, “Fourth,
new players have emerged, notably the hedge funds and private equity funds. The
number of hedge funds is estimated to have grown from a mere 610 in 1990 to
9,575 in the first quarter of 2007, with a value of about $1,600bn under
management. Hedge funds perform the classic functions of speculators and
arbitrageurs in contrast to traditional ‘long-only’ funds, such as mutual
funds, which are invested in equities or bonds. Private equity fundraising
reached record levels in 2006: data from Private Equity Intelligence show that
684 funds raised an aggregate $432bn in commitments.”
(We have discussed hedge funds and private equity
funds elsewhere. http://www.marxist.com/hedge-funds-speculation-and-capitalism.htmhttp://www.marxist.com/private-equity-capitalist-mutation260207-6.htm)
Basically hedge funds are betting syndicates for
very rich people. They are run by investment managers. They are private and
unregulated. There were estimated to be 8,000, but there has been a big
shake-out since the present financial crisis. Their claim to be able to
outperform the market, which is what makes them so attractive to the rich, has
been severely tested and many have disappeared. Never the less they were
described in 2006 as economically “the eighth biggest country in the world.”
For the moment all we want to add is that when the
mainstream banks slice and dice debts and pass them on as securities, they do
not literally disappear from the earth, even if they no longer impinge on the
consciousness of the bankers who transferred them. Someone buys them. There is
therefore a secondary banking sector linked to the official banks. Hedge funds
have been a central institution of secondary banking. But because they are
linked to the regular banks and the rest of the capitalist economy by a
thousand threads, they are bound to take a hit when the rest of the capitalist
economy cops it. Hedge funds are famously secretive institutions, only invested
in by the super-rich. It is the secondary, unregulated banking sector that has
exploded over past recent years. It is the secondary banking sector that has
collapsed. Now it is dragging the rest of finance capital, and of the whole
capitalist system, into crisis.
But when shares go down, the owners sell and
contribute to the catastrophe. In an article in the Financial Times (12.01.09) George Soros is reported to have told
the US Congress that hedge funds would shrink during the present crisis by
50-75% from their $2,000bn (that’s $2trn) peak. The fundamental problem was
that they were so heavily leveraged. Funds were reported as betting thirty
times as much as their assets, boosted by cheap loans. The same paper reported
that they have probably wound down their holdings of listed companies from
$3,500bn in mid-2008 to $1,500bn by the end of the year. Clearly this is not
just a disaster for the overpaid employees of hedge funds in Mayfair, for whom
the reader may or may not shed a tender tear, but is disastrous for the future
of those listed companies and their employees.
Back
to Wolf’s analysis (The new
capitalism: how unfettered finance is fast reshaping the global economy.
Financial Times 19.06.07)
“Fifth,
the new capitalism is ever more global. The sum of the international financial
assets and liabilities owned (and owed) by residents of high-income countries
jumped from 50 per cent of aggregate GDP in 1970 to 100 per cent in the
mid-1980s and about 330 per cent in 2004.
“What explains the
growth in financial intermediation and the activity of the financial sector?
The answers are much the same as for the globalisation of economic activity:
liberalisation and technological advance….”
Liberalisation
Martin Wolf is quite right that liberalisation is a
major factor in the financial explosion. Before the 1970s monetary crisis the
world’s financial affairs were governed by the Bretton Woods system of monetary
management laid down at the end of the Second World War. This was basically a
fixed exchange rate regime. We have to say that this tightly regulated system
of financial management presided over much more spectacular results in real
economic performance than anything that has happened since, when the ‘animal
spirits’ of the entrepreneurs have been allowed free rein. Exchange rates were
fixed and restrictions on capital movements were universal. In Britain and
other capitalist countries exchange controls strictly limited the movement of
capital before 1979. This in turn restricted the scope of speculation. Keynes’
remarks in ‘The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money’ (Cambridge University Press 1973 p. 159)
seem borne out. “Speculators may do no harm as
bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when
enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital
development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino,
the job is likely to be ill-done.”
Thatcher was the first leader of a major capitalist
country to scrap exchange controls. Now they are a thing of the past in the
advanced capitalist countries. (They were sensibly reintroduced in Malaysia in
1998 to immunise the country from the regional financial crisis that started in
1997. India and China still have exchange controls.).
Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods settlement,
we have seen an orgy of deregulation. (See https://communist.red/neoliberalism.htm)
In the USA the Glass-Steagall Act left over from Roosevelt’s New Deal strictly
separated commercial and investment banking. All the other domestic banking
systems were rigidly regulated. In London the ‘big bang’ of 1986 heralded the
end of cosy regulated City establishment. Instead we saw capitalism red in
tooth and claw in London competing with New York for the position of financial
capital of the world.
Fixed and floating
exchange rates
In a more recent article, Martin Wolf links the
explosion of currency reserves as a destabilising element in the world
capitalist system with the floating exchange rate regime. “Between January 2000 and April 2007, the stock of global foreign
currency reserves rose by $5,200bn. Thus three-quarters of all the foreign
currency reserves accumulated since the beginning of time have been piled up in
this decade.” (Financial Times 09.10.08) Under fixed exchange rates
monetary flows, to pay for flows of goods and services in the opposite
direction, were in effect self-liquidating in that they disappeared into the
receiving country’s reserves. Under a floating exchange rate regime, national
banks do not in principle have to maintain foreign exchange reserves to back
the currency. So they can multiply without number and be acquired by
speculators.
Liberalisation was inevitable as capitalism after
1971 entered an era of floating exchange rates. Capital movements were no
longer just the counterpart of trade in goods between countries. Capital was
set free! Capital movements soon dominated the movement of goods by a factor of
100:1. It was these capital flows that determined exchange rates, not the
balance of payments of a country. Capital outflow could bring any government
not prepared to do the bidding of international capital to heel. (For more on
the implications of exchange rate regimes on the accumulation of capital, see https://communist.red/the-world-economic-crisis-and-the-%E2%80%98emerging-economies%E2%80%99.htm)
Computers in trading
As to technology, it has helped to transform the
financial environment. Risk assessment was largely a personal matter till the
building up and availability of banks of data on the creditworthiness of
millions of citizens. Typically the borrower had to appear before a bank
manager, of the kind typified by Captain Mainwaring in ‘Dad’s Army’, and
explain why they needed the money. In the City cliques of blue-blooded bankers
typically relied on trust between one another as the glue that held their
financial transactions together. Risk is no longer monitored individually.
Transactions are logged and risk assessed mathematically. Experian is a British
firm with sinister banks of information on the ‘consumer preferences’ and
credit history of virtually every citizen in the land. Nor is risk held at the
bank with the loan. It is securitised and passed on, and agency fees are
pocketed in the process. The illusion was allowed to develop that, in this
manner, risk had disappeared. Out of sight, out of mind. As explained earlier,
rather than being localised, risk is being packed into the foundations of the
global financial system. It is made systemic.
Secondly banks of computers are routinely used to
develop the complex programmes and predictions evolved from advanced
mathematics with the noble aim of making money through speculation. We deal
later with the ‘efficient markets hypothesis.’ Briefly markets are assumed to
be ‘efficient’, in the sense that they process all available information.
One implication of the theory is that, ‘you can’t
beat the markets’ – not consistently at any rate. This, of course, does not
prevent capitalists expending vast amounts of blood and treasure in an attempt
precisely to beat the markets. One such model is called the Black-Scholes
options-pricing mechanism. Perry Mehrling
– in ‘Fischer Black and the Revolutionary Idea of Finance’ (John Wiley, 2005) –
notes that, despite the occult quality of these mathematical endeavours, there
is no evidence that this model ‘added value’ to their assets. But the myth
lives on.
Here’s a note from Scientific American (December 2008 p. 21) on why these programmes
failed. “As Benoit Mandelbrot…wrote in Scientific
American in 1999, established modeling techniques presume falsely that
radically large market shifts are unlikely and that all price changes are
statistically independent; today’s fluctuations have nothing to do with
tomorrow’s – and one bank’s portfolio is unrelated to the next’s. Here is where
rocket science and reality diverge.”
Wolf
concludes, (The new capitalism: how unfettered finance
is fast reshaping the global economy. Financial Times 19.06.07)
“Yet there is
also a shorter-term explanation for the explosive recent growth in finance:
today’s global savings and liquidity gluts. Low interest rates and the
accumulation of liquid assets, not least by central banks around the world,
have fuelled financial engineering and leverage. How much of the recent growth
of the financial system is due to these relatively short-term developments and
how much to longer-term structural features will be known only when the easy
conditions end, as they will.”
Since he wrote the article Martin Wolf has come to
see how much of the inexorable progress he outlined was a pure, unsustainable
financial bubble. But the article was the conventional wisdom little more than
a year ago.
“What then
have been the consequences of this vast expansion in financial activity, much
of it across international borders?
“Among the
results are that households can hold a wider array of assets and also borrow
more easily, so smoothing out their consumption over lifetimes. Between 1994
and 2005, for example, the liabilities of UK households jumped from 108 per
cent of GDP to 159 per cent. In the US, they soared from 92 per cent to 135 per
cent. Even in conservative Italy, liabilities rose from 32 per cent to 59 per
cent of GDP.”
The notion that this amounts to ‘smoothing
consumption over one’s lifetime’ is far-fetched. What is really going on with
these spiraling liabilities is people getting head over heels in debt.
Mergers and
acquisitions
“Similarly,
it is ever easier for companies to be taken over by, or merge with, other
companies. The total value of global mergers and acquisitions in 2006 was
$3,861bn, the highest figure on record, with 33,141 individual transactions. As
recently as 1995, in contrast, the value of mergers and acquisitions was a mere
$850bn, with just 9,251 deals.”
In the first place a merger typically does not
raise a penny for new investment. Vast sums of money are indeed mobilised, but
for the sole purpose of changing the ownership of assets, not for increasing
their productive power. Secondly we note that all surveys show that mergers and
takeovers are usually unsuccessful in improving real economic performance. Put
bluntly, the merger movement is a huge waste of energy and resources, and the
fact that financial mobilisation
makes mergers possible on an ever larger scale cannot be regarded as any form
of ‘progress.’ Can capitalist dinosaurs spending all their energy eating one
another be regarded as progress?
After his breathless exposition, Wolf injects a
note of caution. “Pessimists would argue
that monetary conditions have been so benign for so long that huge risks are
being built up, unidentified and uncontrolled, within the system. They would
also argue that the new global financial capitalism remains untested.”
The pessimists were right.
Working
class households
Let us look at the development of financialisation,
starting with the household sector. In the nineteenth century workers did not
use banks. Skilled workers had a strong savings ethos. But life was precarious.
They were only one wage packet away from destitution. A host of voluntary
savings societies catered to their need. None of these funds flowed into or out
of the banking system. Banks were certainly missing a trick to make money out
of workers’ savings. The Bank of England’s smallest note issued was £5, the
equivalent of several weeks’ wages for any worker.
For a nineteenth century worker, the unskilled in
particular, wages were usually spent as soon as they were received. For workers
of that time surviving on a subsistence wage, the only ‘provision’ for being
looked after in old age was to submit themselves to the Poorhouses, the ‘poor
law Bastilles’, unless they could rely on the charity of others in their family
who were better off.
The banks
made their money elsewhere. The banks’ obsession with the finance of world
trade, and the consequent ignoring not only of workers’ saving needs, but also
of the requirements of capitalist manufacturing as we shall see, was typically
part of the process by which British capitalism lost its pre-eminence. Economic
historians have declared that the banks did not ‘fail.’ In the light of the
relative decline of British capitalism this seems a metaphysical proposition.
Certainly British capitalism, of which the banks were a central part, failed in
the competitive struggle against rival capitalist powers.
In the modern era each individual is perceived by
the banking system as “a two legged cost and profit centre,” as Robin Blackburn
puts it. (New Left Review The subprime
crisis April 2008 p. 84) Workers
are expected to go into debt if they go to university. These loans are
commodified and sold on. Workers are expected to go into debt to buy a house.
In Britain there is little other option for most people. Wages are becoming a
form of loanable funds, a site for profit-making by the financial institutions.
Now working class people see their wages as subject
to all kinds of exactions and financial flows. The credit card, let it be
remembered is, despite our universal reliance upon it, a relatively recent
invention. More and more ways of borrowing are being opened up to ‘the
consumer.’ Historically the household sector has always been in net surplus. No
longer. In recent years both the British and US household sectors have slid
into deficit as the burden of debt upon families has soared.
Every aspect of consumption has been financialised.
Apart from the attempt to get consumers in hock through mortgages and credit
cards on every aspect of their private spending, this principal percolates into
as many aspects of our collective consumption as it will fit.
- State old age pensions were
introduced in this country in 1908 as an unfunded system. How could it
possibly have been otherwise? As a politician, Lloyd George could not have
been expected to levy national insurance payments from voters and start
handing out pensions decades later when the pot had filled up. Apart from
anything else, this would have been electoral suicide. The point is made
to illustrate the wider principle that, even when people are told that
their benefits are matched by their contributions, the reality is that
this year’s pensions are paid from the current national insurance fund.
- Workers are told to save for their old age. In some
cases this is a complete illusion. Pensions, including private pensions, are
paid for from current national income, just as this year’s apples are plucked
from this year’s apple trees. Payments from pension funds are a claim on
current national income, though the assets piled up are presented as saving for
a distant future. Most of this monetary flow out of the funds is not real
investment in the sense of increasing the productive capacity of the nation. It
chases yet more paper assets. But these huge funds mean a huge increase in
institutional finance. Pension funds and insurance companies are major players
in financial markets. These funds need fund managers. Fund managers require
fees. We shall see later what effect all this has on stock markets.
- In relation to the health
service, Aneurin Bevan was emphatic that the NHS should be funded from
general taxation. The introduction of the Private Finance Initiative,
along with other ‘reforms’ aimed at creating a market in the health
service where none existed, have transformed the situation. What is
significant about PFI is that the task of providing the infrastructure of
the NHS such as hospitals is compulsorily handed over to the financial
sector by the simple expedient of forbidding the public sector the right
to borrow, as it had done for fifty years before. Since the private
consortium owns the buildings they also provide the health service as a
private profit-making business. Two features of the mentality of
capitalism in the age of financialisation pop up. The first is that no
management expertise in providing health care is regarded as necessary. An
accountant will do just as well, or even better. The second is that a
service based on current spending, mainly on wages, is turned into a
series of financial flows. - Higher education: when grants
were replaced by loans and students had to pay fees, higher education
became commodified. Another stage in the endless life cycle of workers
accumulating debt and paying it off was created. And of course they are
using PFI to fund school building. In doing so they have exposed
education, the health and other elements of the essential infrastructure
of our society to the vagaries of the banking crisis. The banks, central
to the whole project, have just turned the finance tap off. Will PFI
survive? Early signs are that New Labour will guarantee the contracts,
thus removing any last fiction that PFI is about switching risk to the
private sector. Just guaranteed profits for them – in boom or in slump.
Anything is better than slaughtering the sacred cows that show the
government’s commitment to ‘pro-business’ policies.
Middle class savings
The Victorian middle class did save, but their
savings did not serve to grease the wheels of industrial investment. Famously
they would put their money into railway bonds and state and municipal bonds in
exotic countries. (It is argued that British capitalism did benefit indirectly
from this early trend to ‘globalisation.’ Railways being pushed into the
interiors of far-away places opened them up as markets for dominant British
manufactures.) The British middle class also bought government securities
(consols), but seldom bought into shares of any kind. Banks were also geared to
financing world trade by dealing in bills of exchange and other trade-related
paper and domestic monetary and credit circulation, rather than financing
industrial investment.
Government
The government sector was comparatively small in the
nineteenth century. Throughout most of the twentieth century state spending
rose as a proportion of national income, and the national debt ballooned on
account of two world wars. The welfare state, beginning with old age pensions
and the National Insurance Act of 1911, was based on spending out of current
government income from values generated by current working people, rather than
generating the illusion that NI, pensions and other transfer payments were a
form of saving for the future.
The corporate sector
Nor did banks
lend long term to industry at least in Britain and the USA. They still don’t.
More than 90% of investment funds in those countries are internally generated,
that is to say they come from profits ploughed back. Yet industry is more and
more dependent on finance, and finance more and more dependent on industry.
Every major car firm now has its own hire purchase company, such as the General
Motors Acceptance Corporation and the Ford Motor Credit Company. Before these
were set up, a car buyer would have had to save up, or try their chance for a
bank loan. These credit institutions are more than just a convenience to these
car companies. They illustrate the way that production has been almost erased
as a separate activity in a welter of financial calculation at the top of a big
corporation. The crisis of these HP companies is an important part of the
present acute crisis in the world motor industry.
Anglo-American
capitalism versus the ‘bank’ model
There are undoubted differences between different
capitalist nation states. These differences are products of their different
history and evolution. We are going to refer to these different types as
‘models.’ The reader should not get the impression that the ruling class,
tiring of the failure of their own model of capitalism, can select another from
off the shelf. They are also victims of historical processes, are trapped in
the form of capitalism that has evolved and, like the captain of the ship, will
go down with their system.
One of the differences between Anglo-American
capitalism and the German type concerns the interaction between production and
finance capital. Historically, the ‘stock exchange’ capitalism of Britain and
the USA has been contrasted to the ‘bank’ model typified by Germany, and later
in a modified form by Japan and countries such as Korea.
German capitalism of his time was the model for
Hilferding in his classic ‘Finance
Capital.’ (Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1981) It should be noted that
Lenin in ‘Imperialism, the highest stage
of capitalism’ (Progress Publishers
1966) gave a broader sociological definition of finance capital than
Hilferding’s strict reliance on the practices of German banks. After all Lenin
used and adapted the Liberal-radical Hobson’s analysis in his treatment of
British imperialism. Likewise he tended to speak of the ‘fusion of financial
and productive capital’ in preference to Hilferding’s formulation of the
‘domination of finance capital.’
The specific phenomena incorporated into
Hilferding’s theory are often seen as of two-fold significance: first they have
been seen as part of the launching of German capitalism as a major competitor
nation on the world economy. Whereas British capitalism evolved ‘organically’
from petty artisan production, German capitalism could only compete on the
world market at the time it emerged as big business. This required large amounts
of fixed capital. This in turn meant that industrial capital could not be
financed by private capitalists, as was generally the case with early British
capitalism, but firms had to have recourse to borrowing. This gave the banks a
key role. Secondly this teutonic form of capitalism persisted till quite
recently in that banks lend long term and develop an active interest in
monitoring their investments in manufacturing firms. This in turn meant that
capitalism could develop long term perspectives, as opposed to the chronic
‘short termism’ characteristic of Anglo-American capitalism. So the structure
of German capitalism was a part of its combined and uneven development.
Conventional economic historians call this the Gerschenkron thesis, but
Marxists will recognise it comes from Leon Trotsky.
The stock exchange
The stock exchange is not a major source of
investment finance for most capitalist firms in most capitalist countries. Of
course a company can issue new shares as a means of raising funds. But as Lazonick
has pointed out, many executives have been more concerned with stock
repurchases, that is withdrawing their shares from the exchanges. Buying a
second hand share of a car company in the bourse is no more advantage to the
motor company than buying a second hand car.
So why is the share price important? It is important
because the share is the modern form by which capitalists own the means of
production. The dividend and hoped for increase in the price are the rewards of
being a capitalist. The shareholders are the people the managers have to butter
up. The share price is therefore a central determinant of the behaviour of
those who run the firm.
We can look at the options for different forms of
capitalism in terms presented by organisational theorists such as Albert
Hirschman (‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty,’
Harvard University Press, 1970). He looked at the likely reactions to
unsatisfactory prospects in life as a choice between ‘voice’ and ‘exit.’
In Britain and the USA the stock exchange is
actually dominated by these institutional investors. Personally owned shares
are only a tiny minority of those traded. The fund managers have their own
techniques. If they perceive failure, in terms of the price of a share in their
portfolio heading south, they just sell.
Here the instant reaction from the institutional investor is to ‘exit,’
showing no ‘loyalty’ whatsoever – any more than a gambler would to a horse that
had fallen at the firs
