The accounts of "financialisation" varied considerably in their detail. But they all shared a contention that the "dominance" of "finance" led to a shift in the dynamic of the system. Productive capital, it was argued, was concerned with productive accumulation. In the early post-war years this had occurred across the industrial world, even if it was organised differently in the US and Britain, where industrial corporations had used internally generated profits in order to undertake long-term investments, and in Japan and West Germany, where collaboration with the banks had provided such investment. But the rise of big investment funds and the "dominance" of finance had changed that. The situation now was that all the pressure was on firms to deliver quick returns to shareholders ( "shareholder value" ) through high dividend payments and measures that ensured a high share price (so boosting shareholders' capital gains), and on governments and national banks to keep interest rates high. Versions of this standpoint had been presented by Keynesian writers like Will Hutton and William Keegan in the 1990s to counterpose the "short-termism" of "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism to supposedly long-term, more investment oriented approaches of Japanese and German capitalisms.s3 Now it was extended to all the advanced industrial countrieswith the partial exception of Germany. s4
Financialisation and the Bubbles That Burst
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