Financial globalization and the unravelling of the Japanese model

The post-war Japanese model was predicated on the ability of Japan to resist the kind of globalizing, marketizing laissez faire represented by Thatcherism and Reaganism and the ability of Japanese firms, backed up by the state, to exploit that very globalization and marketization to expand their world market shares. At the core of the model was the financial system. John Zysman (1983) has argued that the financial system has constituted the core of each of the dominant national models of political economy in advanced industrial countries. Finance plays this role for several reasons (Cerny 1993, 1994, 2000b, 2000c).