ABSTRACT
Extraordinary growth of the financial relative to the nonfinancial sector has marked the development of mature capitalism during the last four decades. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows that financial profitability rose strongly from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. It examines the factors that enabled European banks to expand their USD-denominated balance sheets across the Atlantic through the US shadow banking system in the 2000s. The book emphasizes the importance of adopting a class- and rent-based approach to housing, empirically based on the link with political attitudes and macroeconomic dynamics. It identifies several stages of market domination of the real economy. The book argues that the decisive characteristic of financialization is the preeminence of financial accumulation over productive accumulation and of capital-as-property over capital-as-function.
