ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains, more carefully, how financialization effected the other US social sectors while controlling for broader changes in the US economy. It explores the consequences of financialization for household inequality and the structure of nonfinancial business in the US, while attempting to control for broader macroeconomic trends and, albeit less systematically, the relations between the US and the rest of the world. The book reviews the macroeconomic evidence about financialization in the traditional source of national income accounts data from 1929-2020 in the US: the Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis’s National income and product accounts. It also explores the implications of the second largest variance in the balance-sheet data from the US from 1945 to 2019: the proportional decline of US households. The book examines how financialization hollowed out nonfinancial business enterprises in the US.
