The Fall and Rise of American Finance From JP Morgan to Blackrock

How Wall Street concocted a more volatile and dangerous capitalism

The Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan’s vast empire to the rise of finance behemoth BlackRock. Contrary to what is taken for common sense by figures from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, Maher and Aquanno insist that financialization did not imply the hollowing out of the “real” economy or the retreat of the state. Rather, it served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, profits, and the exploitation of labor—with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.

Stephen Maher is Associate Editor of the Socialist Register and author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave, 2022). He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Canada.

Scott M. Aquanno is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ontario Tech University, and a Visiting Associate at the Global Labour Research Centre at York University.  He is the author of Crisis of Risk: Subprime Debt and US Financial Power from 1944 to Present (Edward Elgar, 2021).

Preface

1: The Latest Phase of American Capitalist Development
The Fall and Rise of American Finance
A New Picture of Financialization
Rethinking Finance and the Corporation

2: Classical Finance Capital and the Modern State
Financial Capital and Industrial Capital
From Bank Capital to Finance Capital
Finance Capital and Competition
State Power, Class Power, and Crisis

3: Managerialism and the New Deal State
Remaking Capitalist Finance
The New Industrial Order
Class Struggle and the Crisis of Managerialism

4: Neoliberalism and Financial Hegemony
The Financialization of the Non-Financial Corporation
Asset-Based Accumulation and Market-Based Finance
Financialization and Authoritarian Statism
The 2008 Crisis and the Question of Decline

5: The New Finance Capital and the Risk State
Crisis Management and the Risk State
The Rise of the Big Three
The New Finance Capital
Private Equity, Hedge Funds, and Finance Capital

6: Crises, Contradictions, and Possibilities
The Statization of Market-Based Finance
The Macroeconomic Policy of Finance Capital
The False Promise of Universal Ownership
Democratizing Finance

Notes
Index