Rethinking the Financialisation of Non-Financial Corporations: A Reappraisal of US Empirical Data

Abstract

This article assesses the claims of the shareholder value literature of the effects of financialisation on non-financial corporations and, particularly, the claim that fixed capital accumulation in the United States has been impeded by the increasing financial payments of non-financial corporations, and also by these firms transforming themselves into rentiers. The financialisation explanation of macro patterns assumes that trends in the 1970s and early 1980s are representative of the pre-financialisation era but that is not so. Another complication is the global sphere. The vast expansion of majority-owned foreign affiliates from the mid-1990s suggests that the managers of US non-financial corporations did not abandon growth objectives. Claims about rentieralisation also require further investigation. On the one hand, it is misleading to treat all external investment as a financial asset and to assume that corporate dividends provide a robust proxy for financialisation. On the other hand, the shift to external accumulation by US non-financial corporations is obscured due in part to the conceptual limitations of direct investment data, and the widespread strategy of forming non-bank holding companies to funnel cross-border activities.

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