The restructuring of productive capital took place increasingly, as we have seen, across national borders, even if mostly it was regional, not global, in scope and did not measure up to much of the hype about globalisation. But industry could not restructure in this way without having financial connections across borders. It required international financial networks if it was to repatriate profits or establish subsidiaries elsewhere in the world. An important source of profit for some sections of financial capital lay in the fees to be gained by overseeing acquisitions and mergers of productive firms, and that meant there was a gain to be made in operating multinationally before they did. As in Marx's description of finance in his day, it led the way in encouraging productive capital to reach out beyond its established bounds.
Multinational productive capital, in turn, opened up new vistas for multinational financial transactions. The success of the Japanese car industry in penetrating US markets in the late 1970s laid the ground for the flow of Japanese finance into both productive investments (car plants) and real estate speculation in the US. And the flows of funds and commodities within multinational corporations provided conduits by which financial transactions could if necessary escape governmental control.
As chains of buying and selling grew longer than ever, so did the chains of borrowing and lending-and with them the opportunities grew ever greater for financial institutions to make profits through borrowing and lending that had no immediate connections with processes of production and exploitation. This took place in a wider context which made the search for profit through finance increasingly attractive to capitalists of all sorts-the fall in profit rates from their level in the long boom (as described in Chapters Eight and Nine). Capitalism internationally went through nearly four decades in which profitability was substantially lower, even in its period of recovery, than that which had enabled it to expand production and accumulate so rapidly previously.
Profitability did not collapse completely, and there was a continuous growth of a mass of past surplus value seeking opportunities
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