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This chapter begins by contrasting “goodwill” in finance and industrial capitalism, and the evolution of the former in the United States with the latter in Japan. In rejecting the “spirit” of finance capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s, Japanese executives committed themselves to linking efficiency and equity, and laid the foundations for the emergence of the postwar community firm. This historical perspective helps us to understand the reception of finance capitalism‐inspired corporate governance reform in the 1990s, and its attempts to reorient Japanese executives to an outward focus on shareholder interests. It also helps us to understand why, despite considerable change to formal institutions – especially legislation – executives remain skeptical over the efficiency (not to mention equity) claims of finance capitalism. At heart they continue to believe that, to deserve greater attention, shareholders should also demonstrate commitment.

This chapter explains the rise of the system of finance capitalism, and the SRI movement's attempts to bring some social and environmental accountability to it. It canvasses the various types of financial institutions and the roles they play in corporate financing. The extent to which companies rely on external financing is examined, because it has an important bearing on the potential influence of SRI. The final part of the chapter explains the history, philosophies, and methods of SRI. It shows how SRI has evolved from its traditions of church-based, single-issue activism to a broad constellation of financial actors campaigning on various social and environmental issues. Concomitantly, the range of techniques used to implement SRI has changed considerably, with a general movement away from strict ethical screens and divestment in favor of strategies of corporate engagement and selection of “best-in-class” companies.

This chapter examines the role played by American literature in the rise of finance capitalism, one of the more prominent and controversial processes of globalization at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, it analyzes the transformation in Henry James's understanding of the relationship between America and Europe by focusing on major revisions in his 1907 novel The American. It shows how those revisions enabled James to transform a straightforward satire of Gilded Age investment bankers into a scathing critique of finance capitalism and an analysis of the global cultural economy that aligned the cultural commitments and economic interests of Europe and America.

Chapter one draws on histories of suicide and historical studies of industrial labour in order to examine whether work suicide constitutes a new phenomenon reflecting the historically specific conditions of neoliberalism. Despite the poor material conditions of labour under industrial capitalism, there are few recorded cases of work-related suicide. In 19^th century France, suicide was characterised as a marginal phenomenon that affected the most impoverished social groups: the jobless, the destitute or the infirm. The chapter examines the structural transformations that have precipitated a rise of suicides in the workplace and in particular, the shift to a finance-driven economic order. From a source of productivity and therefore profit under industrial capitalism, labour has become, in the contemporary context, an obstacle to rational and extraneous financial goals that needs to be removed. Suicides are the product of differential neoliberal management regimes. On the one hand, suicides affected workers who were pushed to their very limits by management in a bid to increase their individual productivity, economic worth and therefore maximise profits. On the other, suicides affected workers who were pushed out of the workplace as a form of surplus cost.

This chapter documents how the venture capital system captures yearnings for technological alternatives. It follows the workings of a foreign-funded hardware incubator program in Shenzhen that trained people to translate their commitments to social justice into a pitch for finance capital. The incubator program taught people how to see themselves as human capital. Human capital, political theorist Wendy Brown suggests, “is the next step of homo oeconomicus as a neoliberal agent that seeks to strengthen his/her competitive positioning. Neoliberal rationality remakes the human being as human capital.” The chapter then shows that the turning of the self into human capital is all but an inevitable outcome of neoliberal capitalism but has to be actively taught and learned.

This chapter on US finance-led capitalism is the first of the three chapters to investigate the domestic origins of international economic cooperation and conflicts. First it builds on the trilemma triangle introduced in Chapter 2 and explains the US position. The chapter then investigates the historical origin of the US finance-led model of capitalism. It then turns to investigating the economic foundation of this model, before turning to the political economy of the US-specific neoliberal class compromise. As we shall see, the UK is also mentioned frequently as another finance-led country that has similar preferences to the US, and, with the British exit from the EU, the UK will probably align even more closely with the US.

Chapter 2 examines the co-temporality of political regimes, recognition of which leads to formulating the co-temporality of hitherto fragmented groups of labor including unionized domestic workers, non-unionized irregular workers, foreign migrant workers, and ethnic returnees.

This concluding chapter reviews the labor and sites that have long challenged the inevitability of technological progress and its violence. The socialist pitch and the production of hopeful anticipation depend on happiness labor — the labor that produces a feeling of optimism and hope despite the proliferating sense of rising precarity. If one attends to the labor and the instruments of affect that finance capitalism needs, one notices the vulnerability of capitalist production — that is, one notices that the relationship between technology, life, and markets can be otherwise. The chapter then argues that if we attend to the labor that is necessary to nurture and sustain entrepreneurial life, we can mobilize other feelings to subvert the political economy of affect that runs on the promise of happiness. We can subvert the seemingly endlessly spiraling displacement of technological promise if we reframe what counts as intervention by moving away from the ideal types of countercultural heroism.

This chapter takes up the previous chapter's topics of market economy and finance capitalism from the point of view of justice, which is considered in relation to freedom in terms of guiding ethical concepts. The enlightened liberalism being defended defines justice in terms of freedom, which the author argues is viable only in terms of reciprocal restriction.

In the Caribbean, the banking collapse and the economic crisis of the 1930s ignited a simmering anti-imperial antipathy and unleashed a current of nationalism targeting the United States and Wall Street. This chapter examines the struggles by Wall Street to consolidate its position in the Caribbean during these turbulent years and the growing local challenges to the punitive regimes of debt, the monopoly presence of foreign financial institutions, and the suffocation of national sovereignty and independence. The chapter argues that the crisis of finance capitalism in the United States was also a crisis of racial capitalism in the Caribbean as indictments of the prevailing racial order accompanied nationalist resistance to foreign banking and corporate monopoly. Calls for sovereignty and invocations of anti-imperialism often drew on figures of blackness to attack white colonialism. These evocations of blackness were ambivalent and often contradictory. While they were sometimes marked by an embrace of blackness, paradoxically, the critique of banking and empire also emerged as an attack on black bodies, especially on black migrant labor. The nationalism of the 1930s led to changes in banking regulation. It also forced the reordering of racial capitalism and its reconstitution within a new neo-colonial register.

The global role of the European Union and its position in the trilemma triangle differ substantially from the global–hegemonic approach pursued by US finance-led capitalism. This chapter first explores the historical choices that countries in Europe made after the collapse of the BWS and the internal, regional dynamics of an emerging integration-led euro capitalism. We show that the EU (and until 1992 the European Economic Community) developed a distinct regional solution for the challenges of globalization with the creation of the single market and the European Monetary Union. This growth model is based economically on a specific European complementary specialization production system and politically on a distinct form of euro-corporatism. This does not mean that national governments and national political economies have become irrelevant, but rather that there is a convergence towards a common EU position when it comes to global economic governance.

This chapter pans westward to investigate a single novel, Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), regarded as the beginning of the Western, an origin story for that national mythology. The Virginian and the Western would seem to have nothing to do with slavery, but as this chapter reveals, slavery supplies the scaffolding for that most American of heroes, the cowboy. This chapter explores the centrality of anti-Blackness in the origins of the Western, engaging with genre theory and Sigmund Freud’s work on jokes. It explains the Western’s appearance against a backdrop of incorporation, finance capitalism, and emerging economic theories of marginalism. Tracing the connections between the frontier economies of the South and the West, and between the slave overseer and the cowboy, it reveals the Western as originating from a fantasy of Black genocide and white supremacy.

Focusing on the Cuban banking crisis of 1920–21, this chapter examines the expansion of US imperial banking and finance into the Caribbean and Latin America in the years immediately following World War I through the history of the Mercantile Bank of the Americas. Backed by a consortium of powerful Wall Street interests including J. & W. Seligman and Co., Brown Brothers and Co., and J. P. Morgan and Co., the Mercantile Bank of the Americas was organized to both take advantage of the unsettled financial conditions of the post-war years and the new permissive federal legislation for international banking put in place by the Federal Reserve system. The chapter shows how the new legal order permitted forms of concentration, cartelization, and collusion in foreign banking, allowing the Mercantile Bank of the Americas to quickly create a expansive network of dependent branch banks and semi-autonomous local banks throughout the American hemisphere. Yet the new legal regimes also encouraged over-expansion and, combined with managerial incompetence, personal corruption, and market instability, the bank's network proved precarious and frail. Its collapse occurred almost as quickly as its emergence; its failure offered lessons on the problems of imperial banking and the limits of US empire.

The Chase National Bank of New York arrived late to imperial banking but quickly developed a strategy for foreign expansion that was aggressive and reckless. As this chapter describes, this strategy initially occurred through the organization of the American Foreign Banking Corporation, an entity that, like the Mercantile Bank of the Americas, was enabled by permissive banking legislation and marked by concentration, collusion, and corruption. It too,was short-lived. In the wake of its failure, the Chase turned to its securities affiliate, the Chase Securities Corporation, and increasingly, the issuance of sovereign debt became a staple of the Chase’s internationalization. Nowhere was this more apparent in Cuba, where the Chase aggressively sought to fund the government of Gerardo Machado y Morales through loans that were questionable for both their fiscal logic and their ethical character. By the end of the 1920s, as the Cuban economy stuttered, largely due to the low price of sugar, and the Machado regime became increasingly repressive, the Chase was called to account for its lending practices and increasingly, its Cuban debts were deemed “odious.” These debts reflected a crisis of sovereignty in Cuba, for the Chase, they promoted a crisis of imperial banking in the Caribbean.

At the same time that the National City Bank of New York was attempting to take over the privately-owned central bank in Haiti, they were making a broader push into the international field. Largely due to the efforts of bank president Frank A. Vanderlip, this push occurred through two new organizational innovations. First, the use the bank’s “security affiliate,” the National City Company, a parallel entity that engaged in activities illegal for the bank itself. Second, through an extensive, developing branch bank networks. While the National City Company’s history was premised on the City Bank’s explicit skirting of domestic banking regulations, the branch bank network was mobilized on the bank of new banking regulation, specifically that of the Federal Reserve system. Both the security affiliate and the branch network required the development, training, and hiring of a new group of managers and executives – including the notorious and important figure of Roger L. Farnham – and both represented the attempt by the City Bank to recast itself as an imperial entity with the aim of displacing European and Canadian competition in the Caribbean and establishing Wall Street as the dominant presence in the finances and banking of the region.

This chapter briefly outlines the history of racial discrimination in the rural South and the ways social justice activists continued the struggle for equality in the decades following the civil rights movement. Civil rights legislation failed to adequately address the economic legacies of past discrimintation, which were compounded by the mass displacement of agricultural workers from the land in the mid-twentieth century. Activists’ calls for government intervention to provide employment, income, education, housing, and health care for displaced workers generated strong resistance from regional elites whose preferred solution to the crisis was for displaced workers to leave. The ideological and political struggles that ensued had consequences for all Americans, not just African Americans, and helped shape national responses to labor displacement during the transition from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism in the late twentieth century.