Money, Finance, and Capitalist Crisis

Extraordinary growth of the financial relative to the nonfinancial sector has marked the development of mature capitalism during the last four decades. The changing balance between the two sectors has altered the outlook of the economy and facilitated the spread of financial concerns, practices, and outlooks across society. The result has been the gradual transformation of contemporary capitalism – namely, its financialization since the late 1970s. There are similarities between the Marxian, the Post-Keynesian and other heterodox approaches to analyzing the profound changes in money and finance in the global economy since the 1980s. Prominent among them is a common focus on financialization but also on the limits of monetary policy, the transformation of banking, the tendency to crisis related to financial excess, and the problematic role of neoliberalism in finance. Furthermore, the complexity of the interrelationship between finance and the rest of the economy has increased since the great crisis of 2007-9. This book tackles several of these developments as well as engaging in debate among different currents of heterodox economics. The chapters in this book were originally published in The Japanese Political Economy.

Introduction: Money, finance, and capitalist crisis Nobuharu Yokokawa and Costas Lapavitsas 1. Profitability trends in the era of financialization: Notes on the U.S. economy Costas Lapavitsas and Ivan Mendieta- Muñoz 2. The comparative advantage of the U.S. shadow banking system and the role of the U.S. dollar Junji Tokunaga 3. Building blocks for the macroeconomics and political economy of housing Engelbert Stockhammer and Christina Wolf 4. Marx’s Financial Capitalism Makoto Nishibe 5. Financialization and the impasse of capitalism Franèois Chesnais 6. State involvement in cryptocurrencies: A potential world money? Juan J. Duque

Nobuharu Yokokawa is Professor of Economics, Musashi University, Tokyo. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Japanese Political Economy and has published widely on the topics of political economy, evolutionary economics, economic history and development economics. Costas Lapavitsas is Professor of Economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is internationally known and published widely on money and finance, contemporary capitalism, the Eurozone, and other topics.