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Larger organizations required firms to develop financial control and information systems as essential elements in their internal monitoring systems, but this proved more problematic in Britain than other countries, not least because of poor planning and control of the production process, and the frequent failure of management to provide appropriate information until well after the middle of the twentieth century. However, the chartered accountancy profession, and to a lesser extent the management accountants, benefited greatly from this inadequacy. After establishing such a strong position in managerial hierarchies, this also laid the basis for a final evolutionary stage, namely, the emergence of financial capitalism after 1970 when City interests came to dominate strategy and structure in the largest firms.

This chapter reviews the frames of reference that have been used throughout the book, especially the development models and the changing implications of the drivers. It then examines the developments in the four themes, in particular how they have changed very considerably to bring Britain’s management systems and structures into line with those of other countries, especially in the last three decades or so. A further section seeks to identify changes in the managerial role during the 20th century and to place the very large increase in managerial numbers into perspective. The final section provides some reflections about the transition to managerial capitalism and financial capitalism, the possible trend to managerialism, and the potential for further change in the future.

The second half of the 19th century saw the high water mark for laissez-faire capitalism. Business people, politicians, and jurists were largely agreed that economic progress was best accomplished in free markets, supported by a minimal state. In this environment, investment banks were extremely important: they levered their reputations and their relationships to create the private laws that were needed to support large-scale financial capitalism. Technological advances forced the merchant banks mentioned in Chapter 5 to specialize in investment banking. This chapter discusses the role of the largest investment banks, and in particular of Kuhn Loeb and JP Morgan, in shaping modern corporate America. The investment banks invested investor activism, and they created the modern investment bank syndicate. In particular, their activist work with financially distressed corporations resulted in the development the ‘equity receivership’, the first coherent corporate bankruptcy law.

The chapter reviews aspects of the possible transformation of the financial system into a banking complex, that comprises both embedded Too Big to Fail (TBTF) financial institutions and disembedded ones. The transformation of the financial system into a two-tier banking complex is the result of the disconnection of the TBTF embedded institutions and the right size to fail disembedded financial institutions. The chapter revises the scope and consequences of this change on the monopolization of financial capitalism and international financial governance. It contains two sub-sections. The first reviews Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness/ disembeddedness and TBTF the second reviews the concept of a complex. This chapter aims to use Polanyi’s concept of embeddedness and disembeddedness in order to understand how the category of TBTF financial institutions came into being through the double movement of market deregulation and social regulation. The concepts of embeddedness in social regulation and disembeddedness under market regulation permit an understanding of how, as the few TBTF financial institutions re-embedded themselves, becoming risk proof, the majority remained disembedded and subject to failures. We argue that, given this, the financial system may no longer be considered a system.

Business corporations developed in the industrializing world in a legal environment which was initially hostile to them. Incorporation was transformed from a privilege into a right. The development of corporate law has led to the advent of Financial Capitalism, in which two forms of capital exist in connection with any given bundle of assets and contracts There is first the capital and contracts required by the productive activity; and there is then the financial capital represented by the financial instruments issued by the corporation. The Chapter provides an example of the evolving relation between firms and States in a globalized economy. The model of a firm adapting its corporate structure to the opportunities offered by the evolving legal rules in an international economy is used. It leads to a reassessment of the necessity to differentiate firms from corporations and to insist on the importance of the rules of corporate governance. The opportunities offered to multinational firms by the international economy combined with an improper mandate to maximize short-term shareholder value, and the biased accounting rules accompanying it, lead to the accounting acknowledgement of « shareholder value creation » even when no real « value » is being created.

This chapter focuses on managerial capitalism, which prevailed in large American public companies from the end of World War II until the 1980s. The chapter opens by summarizing managerial capitalism’s key features. Managerial capitalism’s rise to prominence is explored next. The superseding of “financial capitalism” is described and reasons that a divorce between the ownership of shares and managerial control became the norm in large firms are canvassed. The remainder of the chapter describes the nature of managerial capitalism during its 1950s and 1960s heyday. Particular emphasis is placed on explaining why corporate wrongdoing was a rarity despite seemingly wide discretion being bestowed upon public company executives.

The book gains new insights into the history of Britain’s stock market by foregrounding the power of popular knowledge and specific market practices from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective. Alongside high-level financiers, the voices of the small-scale participants of the market will be heard, an approach that yields a subtle narrative of cultural change and adaptation. Throughout the century, a popular knowledge of the stock market was promoted by the financial press and by numerous investment guides that sold millions of copies. This exposure to the market in everyday life has been overlooked by other accounts preoccupied with intellectuals and economists, Westminster politics, and the engine rooms of high finance. Contextualizing specific financial practices of retail investors offers a better understanding of how the stock market captured the public imagination. In doing so, Playing the Market takes issue with the way the investing public has been conceptualized in the existing literature: all too often the actual investors are either absent from the narrative or are implied to be a homogenous group of rational actors who consciously adjust to changing economic parameters. However, if we listen to their voices and stories, the diversity of attitudes towards investment and speculation comes to the fore as well as the inherent difficulty of distinguishing between the two categories. What some investors considered a perfectly legitimate way of making money, others may have viewed as immoral profiteering. The ensuing moral debates over the social value of buying and selling financial securities mattered profoundly for the legitimacy and popularity of capitalism.

We here explore the gradual emasculation of the household as the basic unit of provisioning during the four evolutionary phases of capitalism. This economic history reveals a gradual redefinition of the purpose of the household from the center of entrepreneurial initiative to a besieged and insecure provider of inconvenient and unwanted labor to managerial capitalism whose central imperative is to reduce labor costs in the service of greater net returns to owners of capital. This evolutionary pathway will reveal the household to be an increasingly precarious and politically vexing participant in global capitalism.

The conclusion underscores the book’s interest in neoliberalism or financial capitalism and reflects on the ways contemporary literary texts represent the realities of poverty. It engages with the idea of oppositional literature that challenges not merely stereotypical accounts of the poor but proposes alternatives to the neoliberal consensus, often in terms of communalism or communitarianism. It argues for the relevance of the humanities in political debates and the need to locate poverty within socio-economic policies rather than regional contexts and behaviors.

This chapter situates the current crisis in relation to both capitalism and the era of neoliberalism and finance capitalism, stressing in particular how an era obsessed with managing risks failed to come to terms with “systemic risk.” Figuring prominently in this is the question of what would happen to a highly leveraged financial system if liquidity dried up. In order to make deeper sense of it, the chapter argues that the internal contradictions of capital accumulation should be addressed. Capitalism works in part by repeatedly challenging, transcending, or working around limits, barriers to growth. It suffers temporary crises and regains momentum as limits are overcome. As such, there is potential for a renewed capitalist momentum with China in the forefront, but there is also the possibility of trying to create a new and different kind of economy more directly focused on meeting human needs.

Antonia Grunenberg draws a parallel between the 19th century view that imperialism was the only way to conduct world politics and the 21st century conviction that there is no alternative to liberal market capitalism. After the end of socialism, capitalism is said to be self-evident. There are supposed to be no alternatives. The only way to change seems to lie within the capitalist system, not beyond it. Against this view, this chapter argues that democracies have provoked a kind of financial capitalism without reflecting on the consequences. As democratic populations have sought to avoid “social costs” they have brought about a total economization of the political discourse, as well as of the concepts of thinking. And the result is a loss of social care.

Greed is often demonized as a cause of the recent crisis. Marasco views this modern “value” not as a cause of the crash, but as a consequence endemic to our society. It is not greed for money and wealth that produces socioeconomic inequalities. Rather, it is a society structured by the principle of socioeconomic inequality that unleashes a particular form of greed that chases after money. The author argues that what is needed in analyzing the “intellectual foundations” of the financial crisis is the vexed term: neoliberalism. The essay dissects neoliberalism into five related theses, contextualized by the Great Recession. At the root of her analysis is the insight that neoliberalism is, at root, a mode of political rationality that is antithetical to chance. On the one hand, neoliberalism refuses chance. On the other hand, it imagines crises as unpredictable chance occurrences that are simply part of the capitalist system. Marasco argues that neoliberalism both refuses and needs the idea of chance in ways that reveal its desire to be seen as a necessary and unquestionable mode of political organization.

This chapter shows how contemporary Irish poetry grapples with the politicized history of place, from the unfinished “ghost estates” to the recent monetization of water and the converted hotels used to keep asylum seekers in perpetual limbo. Readings of Irish poetry by Paula Meehan, Mary O’Malley, Seamus Heaney, and Sarah Clancy argue that the landscapes of contemporary Irish poetry are the indices of dispossession. The chapter then takes up poetic forms of the “block” and the “grid” to look more closely at the dispossessions produced by financialized capitalism, using as case studies British poet Keston Sutherland's Odes to TL61P (2013) and US poet Anne Boyer's "The Animal Model of Inescapable Shock" (2015). Finally, I turn to the literal displacement of forced migration, as well as its feminization and racialization, by reading the Iraqi poet Manal Al-Sheikh's prose poems.

The crisis has its origins in part in the ‘high theory’ provided by mainstream economists, who have helped to create the perception that a deregulated financial market could be an instrument of market efficiency, failing to emphasize the ways in which it could be instead a source of systemic instability. Economists generally failed to understand the significance of the micro-structure of a financialized market economy and therefore the origins of the current crisis. Although bearing some similarities with previous crises, the recent financial crisis was different in having at its core the epistemic confusion generated by complex and often ill-defined instruments. Economists can play a constructive role in future discussions on economic policy, beginning with a recognition that they have recently failed to serve the public interest.

The conclusion brings together and extends some general lines of argument within the book. The book closes with several axioms to question the present reification of life and to offer strategies for non-market living, a user’s guide to living ahumanly that marks affinities and points of critique with new ecologies, disability studies, critical race theory, feminism, animal rights scholars, materialists and realists, and object-oriented ontologists.