The Financialization of the American Elite
Very interesting article.<p>I think what a lot of these articles lack is a discussion of the role that monetary policy plays in the financialization of the American (and, indeed, global) economy. While I agree that there are other factors that lead to the rise of shareholder primacy, I think the most important one is the distortion of relative capital proportions in the economy largely caused through the mechanism of monetary inflation.<p>I find it odd how there is so little literature on this apart from books and papers from the relatively fringe (but no less accurate) Austrian school of economics. Inflation is <i>not</i> something that happens everywhere in the economy at the same time (the Cantillon effect). Inflationary central banking policies benefit those who are closest (relatively) to the money printer, and in modern Western economies this is almost always financial firms and those who marshal capital. Large inflows of money (inflows that have vastly increaed sinced 2008 after the advent of extensive quantitative easing) allow those close to the central bank to have a larger purchasing power than the rest of the economy as inflation has not &quot;trickled down&quot; yet. This allows said financial firms to purchase assets, invest in companies, and capture value in ways they would otherwise not be able to do and in scales that are <i>completely</i> unnatural. And yes, this includes venture capital firms (for many of us who work in startups, we are among those who are relatively closer to central banks, hence the ridiculous salaries). As there is much more money flowing in the system but less &quot;real&quot; wealth, much of this money heads to equity markets to chase returns, and the result is what is described in the article.<p>This distortion of the capital base allows financial firms to hold and direct more capital than they otherwise would, so it is no wonder that the financialisation of the American economy and increases in general economic inequality globally largely began after the gold standard was abolished in 1971 and central bank printing presses were set free.<p>Indeed, I would go so far to say that the real fix to this problem is to abolish inflation targeting (and by consequence the central planning of the money supply through central banks).