The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’ The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In...

We investigate the long-run historical pattern of R&D-outlays by reviewing aggregate growth rates and historical cases of particular R&D projects, following the historical-institutional approach of Alfred Chandler (1962), Douglass North (1981) and Oliver Williamson (1985). We find that even the...

This paper examines three questions: 1) How and why have financial models of doing business emerged in the last three decades? 2) What new forms of financial capitalism have become important in the current period? 3) How do new financial intermediaries, such as private equity, and the financial...

Corporate power in the United States has risen to unprecedented levels, but the rate at which this power has grown is decelerating. Both facts have important implications for the future of U.S. capitalism.

In 2012, we published a paper in the Journal of Critical Globalization Studies titled 'Imperialism and Financialism: The Story of a Nexus'. Our topic was the chameleon-like Marxist notion of imperialism and how its different theories related to finance. Here is the article's summary: Over the...

Economists are not known for their literary imaginations. Flip through any economics textbook and you’ll find a barrage of terms like the ‘Philips curve’ and the ‘Fisher effect’. The jargon is simple enough — empirical relations are usually named after the person who discovered them....

Think of this question as a sword — a sharp piece of steel that cuts through bullshit. In this post, we’ll use it to slice through business-press bullshit about the stock market. You know the stuff — the ubiquitous puff pieces that gush about rising stock prices, as though they benefit...

There’s an old joke that economics is too important to be left to economists. In the same vein, I think rich people are too important to be left to the self-help industry. Yes, the popular appeal of you-can-get-rich-too books is obvious. But what’s not obvious is why so few social scientists...

It turns out that like the rest of us, billionaires experience wealth inequality. (Individuals who top the Forbes billionaire list are far richer than those at the bottom of the list.) Interestingly, this billionaire wealth concentration fluctuates over time … in tight correlation with the...

This paper examines three questions: 1) How and why have financial models of doing business emerged in the last three decades? 2) What new forms of financial capitalism have become important in the current period? 3) How do new financial intermediaries, such as private equity, and the financial...