Introduction: The Structural Power of Finance Meets Financialization*

Florence Dafe, Sandy Brian Hager, Natalya Naqvi and Leon Wansleben
Additional contact information
Florence Dafe: Hochschule für Politik/TUM
Sandy Brian Hager: City, University of London
Natalya Naqvi: London School of Economics and Political Science
Leon Wansleben: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

Politics & Society, 2022, vol. 50, issue 4, 523-542

Abstract: How do we theorize and analyze the structural power of finance when global capitalism itself undergoes constant and profound structural transformation? The literature continues to assume that the source of financial structural power is its unique ability to provide credit to the real economy, playing a crucial role in meeting the investment imperative. But recent research documents that most financial market activities no longer facilitate productive investment and can even be a drag on economic development. If the financial sector's primary role is not to support productive investments, then on what basis does it continue to hold structural power? The contributions to this special issue engage with how decades of financialization have transformed the basis of structural power toward alternative functions that have gone unnoticed in the existing literature. These include household and real estate lending that fuels consumption-led growth, concentration and expansion of financial institutions as tools of geo-economic strategy, financing current account deficits that facilitate global imbalances, and wealth preservation that bolsters inequality.

Keywords: structural power; finance; industrial capitalism; financialization; capital flows; development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323292221125563 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:50:y:2022:i:4:p:523-542

DOI: 10.1177/00323292221125563

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().