Comment on Articles by Green,Loescher, and d’Arge and Wilen

Despite unprecedented lender-of-last-resort efforts by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, the U.S. economy continues to be plagued by high levels of unemployment and foreclosures. Although several proposals to address these problems have been developed, their reactive nature limits their potential effectiveness. This paper describes how combining an employer-of-last-resort program with Treasury-financed mortgage mitigation initiatives could enhance economic stabilization.     

美国经济过度金融化发展的原因、问题及借鉴

美国经济一枝独秀的局面自从被日本崛起打破后,美国制造业逐渐失去优势,巨额贸易逆差无法扭转,必须靠资本项下巨额资本回流弥补,美国金融业的发展恰好起到了这个作用。美国将金融业作为未来经济发展的筹码,致使金融业过度发展,给美国经济带来了美元的衰落、高管天价薪酬和社会收入差距拉大等问题。事实证明,经济金融化作为经济发展的筹码不能维系一个国家的优势地位,金融不能脱离实体经济而发展。     

Identifying the “financialization” of the nonfinancial corporation in the U.S. economy: A decomposition of firm-level balance sheets

This paper develops the concept of the “financialization” of the nonfinancial corporation (NFC) by laying out the key stylized facts describing NFC financial behavior between 1950 and 2014 via a detailed decomposition of firm-level balance sheets. In the existing literature, the concept of the “financialization of the nonfinancial corporation” remains ambiguous; as such, clarification of the trends that have occurred in NFC financial behavior is an important prerequisite for analyses of why NFC behavior has changed and with what consequences. By systematically delineating the evidence for the “financialization” of NFCs, this paper contributes to the literature by establishing precisely how NFC financial behavior has changed in the post-1980 U.S. economy. The growing “financialization” of nonfinancial corporations is summarized by an increased share of financial assets in NFC portfolios, increasing indebtedness and equity repurchases among large firms, and deleveraging among smaller firms. The paper concludes by introducing the behavioral insights gained by approaching these stylized facts from a conceptual standpoint emphasizing the interdependence of portfolio and financing decisions and, thus, the links between the changes in financial behavior across NFC balance sheets.     

Financialization,Class Interests,and Karl Polanyi’s Protective Response

Many observers expected a stronger countermovement against neoliberalism following the Great Recession. This article argues that such a protective response failed to materialize because the financialization process has aligned the preferences of labor and rentier classes. The result has been weaker support in democracies for expansionary monetary and fiscal policies during the early stages of recessions, which further lowers aggregate spending by increasing uncertainty. Thus, reversing the culture of financialization may be a necessary condition for preventing and responding to financial crises.     

Financialization and commodity prices – an empirical analysis for coffee,cotton, wheat and oil

Commodity prices have crucial implications for developing countries. The question whether the financialization of commodity derivative markets has contributed to high and volatile commodity prices has been controversially debated. Building on limitations in the empirical literature, we estimate a multivariate Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model to assess the effect of different groups of financial investors (index investors and money managers) as well as fundamental and macroeconomic variables on the prices of coffee, cotton, wheat and oil. We find that, in contrast to index investors, money managers’ net long positions have a large statistically significant effect on commodity prices. This calls for policy interventions as commodity derivative markets may cease to perform their fundamental developmental roles.     

‘Asset Price Urbanism’ and Financialization after the Crisis: Ireland's National Asset Management Agency

The impact of the global financial crisis on cities is the subject of an important body of research. One aspect which has received surprisingly little attention is the urban dimension of government interventions in the financial sector, particularly given the integration of finance and real estate is widely understood as a key driver of the crisis. This article examines one such intervention, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), a ‘bad bank' established by the Irish government to acquire and manage ‘toxic' real estate loans from the banking sector. Although envisaged as an intervention in the financial sector, the relationship between finance and real estate is such that the agency has a significant impact on urban development and, at the same time, that the management of urban space plays a key role in resolving the financial crisis and restoring the flow of credit in the economy. The article develops the concept of ‘asset price urbanism' to capture the way in which urban space and its relationship to finance is managed to bolster the relationship between real estate and credit, and theorizes this as a significant aspect of contemporary accumulation. The article thus makes an empirically grounded conceptual contribution to literature on the urban dimension of financialization.     

提高我国大宗商品价格话语权的金融对策研究--从有色金属的角度

进入21世纪以来,随着我国经济持续高速发展,城镇化和工业化推动了我国对大宗商品的消费,产量也相应地快速增长,与此形成鲜明对比的是,由于价格话语权的缺失,我国政府和企业始终未能摆脱大宗商品价格受制于人的尴尬局面。本文以有色金属为例深入分析我国大宗商品价格话语权缺失的现状及其原因,认为现阶段金融化因素在国际大宗商品的形成过程中的作用日益凸显。在此基础上,有针对性地提出提高我国大宗商品价格话语权的金融对策和措施。     

客户金融化与企业研发投入——基于中国上市公司核心客户的经验研究

本文立足供应商企业,基于中国沪深A股非金融类上市公司2007~2018年披露的上市核心客户信息,理论分析与实证检验客户金融资产投资对其研发投入的影响,以考察客户金融化行为的供应链经济后果。研究发现,客户企业金融资产投资对企业研发投入具有显著的正向影响,且随着企业的客户依赖度与商业信用规模的增加而呈现递减的趋势,表明企业认为客户金融化行为是出于预防储备的“蓄水池”动机,有助于降低企业感知的客户经营风险,促进其研发投入增加。基于中国制度背景的进一步分析发现,客户为国有控股以及客户所处地区市场化程度较高时,上述关系表现得较弱,表明该促进效应还要受到客户国有产权性质与所在地区市场化程度的干预。     

Stock Market Capitalism: Welfare Capitalism: Japan and Germany versus the Anglo-Saxons

The financial sector has acquired great prominence in most developed economies. Some authors argue that the growth of finance is at the root of the financial and economic difficulties of the past decade. This article aims to analyze this claim by looking at financialization in the European periphery, focusing on the Portuguese case. The emergence of this phenomenon is contextualized from a historical, economic and international perspective. Based on the analysis of several indicators, the article concludes that the Portuguese economy exhibits symptoms of financialization that are typically found in Southern European countries and that these differ significantly from the patterns characterizing financialization processes in more advanced economies. The article discusses how the increasing importance of financial actors and motives in the Portuguese economy played a decisive role in the emergence of the crisis.     

The Evolution of the Veblenian Dichotomy: Veblen,Hamilton, Ayres,and Foster

One of the most troubling developments in recent years has been widening income inequality in the United States and elsewhere. We argue Post Keynesian Institutionalism (PKI) provides insight into the causes of increasing income inequality and our contribution is threefold. First, we compare PKI to the “financialization” literature, noting key similarities and differences. Second, we examine changes in financial structure and income inequality for a sample of developed nations, showing that financialization has increased in nearly all the countries sampled and that this increase has generally been accompanied by a rise in income inequality. Third, we demonstrate that the development of modern financial structures does not preclude an expansive welfare state and egalitarian public policies. Our finding is congruent with Hyman Minsky's conception of PKI, which stressed both that “economic systems are not natural systems” and that capitalism comes in as many varieties as Heinz has of pickles.