Malignant Growth: A Review of Financialisation in Crisis, Edited by Costas Lapavitsas, and The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time, by William K. Tabb

Notes

1. Mandel is now the chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute.

2. In this respect, Mandel was far ahead of the sociologist-prophets of the risk society, because he explicitly linked the rise of risk with that of finance, a point highlighted by Martin (2002, 207n1): It is interesting that the literature on risk emerges at the same time as the phenomenon of financialization, which is treated as peripheral. This periodization of modernity reinforces the idea of a break between new and old social movements, the one based on knowledge and the other oriented to political economy. The distinction plays into “new labor” politics (in which Giddens figures centrally), whose electoral career has been based on the claim that it is not beholden to working-class formations like unions.

3. The identification of an increasing autonomy of finance echoes earlier debates on state theory (e.g., see Jessop 2001).

4. See http://www.researchonmoneyandfinance.org/ (accessed May 24, 2013).

5. The most likely form of mobilization against the financial sector is that of the new social movements that Nicos Poulantzas (1978) already decades ago saw as opening up a new front of political struggle. See Keaney (2013).

6. History is repeating itself, first as tragedy, in the futile accusations of currency manipulation against China in a context of an overwhelming US trade deficit, with US leaders wishing for another Plaza Accord-type of arrangement (Liu and Deng 2012, 352). Meanwhile, the farcical element is provided by the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) own analysis of the Plaza Accord: “because the dangers of real estate bubbles were not well understood in those years, the Japanese government did not deploy countervailing regulatory and fiscal policies until 1990” (IMF 2011, 54). When did this understanding emerge? What was the Federal Reserve's excuse?

7. The case of US retailer Home Depot in 2007 usefully highlights the misuse and abuse of stock options: (1) far from aligning executive interests with those of shareholders, stock options allowed departing CEO Robert Nardelli to walk away with a US$210 million severance package, despite having overseen a significant reduction of shareholder value; (2) executive compensation is more often not a market-determined issue but instead subject to the whims of a closed circle, often including the executive concerned; (3) far from having no cost, stock options' opportunity cost is the capital the company could have received had they been sold on the open market—a point that took years to register with accounting standards setters. See Bebchuk and Fried (2003) and Plender (2007).