Abstract

This paper reviews various interpretations of the nature and effects of financialization, suggesting that finance has expanded disproportionately, with correspondingly negative effects on the volume and the efficiency of capital accumulation and causing dysfunction in economic and social reproduction, accordingly as finance incorporates a wider range of economic and social activities. This is important in order to understand the relatively slow growth since the end of the post-war boom and the causes and course of the current crisis. The close relationship between financialization and neoliberalism is emphasised, the latter having gone through a shock phase (of state intervention intended to promote private capital in general and finance in particular), followed by further intervention to sustain financialization and respond to its dysfunctions. Consequently, it is important to distinguish between the often inconsistent and shifting incidence of scholarship, ideology and policy in practice that characterises neoliberalism. Alternative strategies will need to go beyond financialization to the material conditions of production and reproduction themselves.