ABSTRACT
From the 1930s to 1970s the United States (US) model of capitalism was based on a Keynesian growth model. Collective bargaining and pro-labour policies were widely accepted. Product market regulation was fairly extensive. Industrial policy in the US was less overt than in other advanced economies, but quite extensive in certain sectors. By the late 1990s the US model had clearly coalesced around a new set of institutions based on a different set of complementarities: deregulated labour markets combined with shareholder-oriented finance and corporate governance to produce a system with highly flexible allocation of productive resources marked by high levels of financialization. This contribution explains this transformation as a combination of three variables: structural features of the US economy; the fragmented institutional character of US policy-making and regulation; and policy convergence between left and right.
