The Fall and Rise of American Finance

How Wall Street concocted a more volatile and dangerous capitalism

The Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan’s vast empire to the rise of finance behemoth BlackRock. Contrary to what is taken for common sense by figures from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, Maher and Aquanno insist that financialization did not imply the hollowing out of the “real” economy or the retreat of the state. Rather, it served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, profits, and the exploitation of labor—with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.Preface

1: The Latest Phase of American Capitalist Development
The Fall and Rise of American Finance
A New Picture of Financialization
Rethinking Finance and the Corporation

2: Classical Finance Capital and the Modern State
Financial Capital and Industrial Capital
From Bank Capital to Finance Capital
Finance Capital and Competition
State Power, Class Power, and Crisis

3: Managerialism and the New Deal State
Remaking Capitalist Finance
The New Industrial Order
Class Struggle and the Crisis of Managerialism

4: Neoliberalism and Financial Hegemony
The Financialization of the Non-Financial Corporation
Asset-Based Accumulation and Market-Based Finance
Financialization and Authoritarian Statism
The 2008 Crisis and the Question of Decline

5: The New Finance Capital and the Risk State
Crisis Management and the Risk State
The Rise of the Big Three
The New Finance Capital
Private Equity, Hedge Funds, and Finance Capital

6: Crises, Contradictions, and Possibilities
The Statization of Market-Based Finance
The Macroeconomic Policy of Finance Capital
The False Promise of Universal Ownership
Democratizing Finance

Notes
Index"Worthy heirs to their teacher, the great Leo Panitch, Maher and Aquanno sketch an alternative history of the last century that every critical scholar of finance must now engage and contend with."
—Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up Capitalism

"A groundbreaking historical work with vital implications for theory and politics. The Fall and Rise of American Finance changes our vision of the present—and the future."
—Clara E. Mattei, author of The Capital Order

"Critical political economists tend to separate finance and ‘the real economy,’ seeing the former as parasitic on the latter. But what if finance has always been there and has always been the mechanism that disciplined capitalism as a whole? Maher and Aquanno explore this alternative reading of financialization. It is a compelling and convincing account."
—Mark Blyth, Professor of International Economics at Brown University

"The Fall and Rise of American Finance: From J. P. Morgan to BlackRock should be required reading for climate justice militants, even if it does not at first appear related to environmental concerns."
—Ashley Dawson, Los Angeles Review of BooksStephen Maher is Associate Editor of the Socialist Register and author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave, 2022). He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Canada.

Scott M. Aquanno is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ontario Tech University, and a Visiting Associate at the Global Labour Research Centre at York University.  He is the author of Crisis of Risk: Subprime Debt and US Financial Power from 1944 to Present (Edward Elgar, 2021).