Tag: Financialization

Cosmopolites, Financiers, Monopolists, and the 2020 Election

~ Karen Petrou ~ Leave a comment

By Karen Petrou

…foreign competitors get to make the goods, and we just buy them.
And then they buy up American companies with the profits.  And
yes, in this bargain there are lots of jobs—jobs on Wall Street, or in
Hollywood, or in Silicon Valley…At the same time, it has encouraged
multinational corporations to move jobs and assets overseas to chase
the cheapest wages and pay the lowest taxes.  And it has rewarded
these same corporations for then turning around and investing their
profits not in American workers, not in American development, but in
financial instruments that benefit the cosmopolitan elite.  And where
has this left middle America?  With flat wages, with lost jobs, with
with declining investment and declining opportunity.  We don’t make
things here anymore—at least, not the kinds of things a normal person
without a fancy degree can build with his hands. Continue reading “Cosmopolites, Financiers, Monopolists, and the 2020 Election” →

This Little Equality Goes to Market

~ Karen Petrou ~ 1 Comment

By Karen Petrou

After crafting the initial features of the post-crisis bank-regulatory framework, global and U.S. policy-makers were dumbfounded to discover that costly new rules changed the competitive financial-market balance.  Mirabile dictu, when costs rose for banks, banks changed their business model to cling to as much investor return as possible instead of, as regulators apparently expected, taking it on the chin to ensure ongoing financial-service delivery at whatever pittance of a profit remained.  As markets rapidly and in some cases radically redefined themselves, global regulators dubbed the beneficiaries of this new competitive landscape “shadow banks.”  At the most recent meeting of the FSB Plenary, they changed   shadow banks to the less stealthy moniker of “non-bank financial intermediaries.”  A new BIS working paper shortens the scope of shadow banking to “market-based finance,” going on to assess a fundamental question:  does the transformation of financial intermediation from banks to non-banks alter the income and equality landscape?  The answer:  It’s complicated. Continue reading “This Little Equality Goes to Market” →