The fictitious economy: Financialization, the state, and contemporary capitalism

The objective of this dissertation is to assess the significance of the growing salience of finance in the U.S. economy in the post-1970s period for debates on the nature of contemporary economic change. I seek to answer several questions about financialization: First, to what extent does the empirical evidence support the claim that we are living in a period in which we can reasonably describe the U.S. economy as having been “financialized”? In a related vein, if there is evidence for financialization, what do the data tell us about the particular timing and magnitude of this phenomenon? Second, what role has the state played in creating the conditions that have promoted and sustained financialization? Which state actors were involved in creating policies favorable to the turn to finance, and where did these policies produce lines of fissure, either within the state or between the state and relevant social actors? Third, how has the terrain upon which the state intervenes in the economy been reconfigured by processes associated with the financialization of the U.S. economy? Has the line between state and market effectively been redrawn in a world in which financial markets dominate the economy? I use each of these questions to critically interrogate one of three standard ways of thinking about the salient shifts that characterize recent historical experience: postindustrialism, globalization, and neoliberalism. In all three cases, I argue that an analysis of financialization can help us make sense of the proliferation of apparently new social forms that have been reshaping capitalist social relations since the 1970s—as well as the social and political limits associated with living in a time of such fervent experimentation.