Financialisation and the new capitalism?

This Special Issue brings together contributions on financialisation and the prospects for a new capitalism. Our aim in putting it together was to stimulate debate on how finance and financial markets and institutions might better serve the real economy and foster economic, social and environmental sustainability. According to one of its better-known definitions, financialisation is ‘the increasing importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions and financial elites in the operations of the economy and its governing institutions, both at the national and international levels’ (Epstein, 2001, p. 1). While aspects of financialisation in this broad sense have been a feature of industrialised capitalism for a long time (Argitis and Pitelis, 2008; Orhangazi, 2008; Vercelli, 2017; Fasianos et al., 2018), most of the current literature focuses on specific features of financialisation that have emerged since the 1980s. The proliferation of securitisation and other new financial instruments, together with the substantial expansion of credit to households (Sawyer, 2018), are a particular focus here. There has also been a lot of work on the extent to which the present era of financialisation has coincided with and possibly been facilitated by a parallel ‘liberalisation’, de-regulation and move to self-regulation of financial markets and the economy more widely, and how these developments have gone hand-by-hand with the rise of globalisation, neo-liberalism and growing inequality (Palley, 2013). Most of the contributions to this Special Issue continue to explore these and related themes, but with a number also examining additional issues such as the role of local government and cities, the scope for de-financialisation, digital platforms and the so-called ‘new economy’ or ‘new capitalism’. We provide a brief introduction to and summaries of the papers in the next section, and then close with some concluding remarks