US financialization accelerated sharply after 1980 deregulation

Evidence

Recent decades have been characterized by the escalation of tension between ongoing financialization and the failed promises of neoliberal reason. As the world emerged from the oil crisis of 1973, the defeat of Keynesian economics (and the corresponding dominance of the neoclassical model) was resounding on both sides of the Atlantic. The story is more or less familiar. As national and international controls over the flow of financial capital were gradually lifted, financial activities expanded exponentially: in the United States, the total financial sector share of gross domestic product increased at a faster rate between 1980 and 2007 (13 basis points of GDP per annum) than it had done in the prior thirty years (7 basis points of GDP per annum) and more than doubled between 1970 (4% of GDP) and 2007 (9% of GDP). The growth rate of financial securities (activities typically associated with investment banks and asset management firms) was even more staggering: from just over 1 percent of GDP in 1980 to just under 5 percent in 2007. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 71

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Grounds the material substrate (capital deregulation timing) that the reader’s trading-to-dating politics migration argument runs on.
• XREF: connects to: US financial sector GDP share growth doubled after capital controls were lifted — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 107; Legislative deregulation drove the US financial sector’s postwar expansion — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 100