Robert Guttmann

• Hofstra University

History teaches us important lessons, provided we can discern its patterns. Multi-Polar Capitalism applies this insight to the crucial, yet often underappreciated issue of international monetary relations. When international monetary systems get first put into place successfully, such as the “classic” gold standard in 1879, Bretton Woods in 1945, o...

The global pandemic forces every country in the world into a complex set of balancing acts between virus spread containment, public health capacity, macro-economic stabilization measures, and business survival amidst depressed levels of activity. Irrespective of how countries perform under these unprecedented conditions of “virus economics”, they f...

Our planet faces a systemic threat from climate change, which the world community of nations is ill-prepared to address, and this book argues that a new form of ecologically conscious capitalism is needed in order to tackle this serious and rising threat. While the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 has finally implemented a global climate policy regi...

We have over-powering evidence, gathered over centuries, that our capitalist system is subject to endemic imbalances, which, if large and/or persistent enough, lead to crisis. This is a recurrent pattern in which underlying imbalances and crises enter into a dialectical relationship, with crises serving here as adjustment processes that may (or may...

In 2007/08, when the world faced one of the greatest financial crises in history, almost no one among economists, bankers, or government officials anywhere had seen this one coming. Why? It was not just the optimism prevailing after so many years of a Goldilocks economy or the orthodoxy’s blind spot when it comes to finance in their models. More tr...

Financialization is a truly global phenomenon; so is shadow banking. Both are vectors of global finance, which emerged in the 1960s with the double inventions of Eurocurrencies and wholesale funding in money markets. The globalization of finance, driven forward by a few hundred transnational banks combining indirect finance, market finance, and net...

On June 22, 2007, the US investment bank Bear Stearns announced that two of its hedge funds, both heavily invested in so-called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), had to be bailed out. While not exactly a surprise, this announcement caused considerable consternation in the financial markets, as it shed light on a new, highly complex, and opaqu...

The different manifestations of the financialization trend show how contemporary capitalism has become dominated by financial institutions, markets, and motives. That dominance changes how our economic system operates. With large institutional investors exercising often impatient control as majority shareholders, corporate managers are increasingly...

Taking our cue from the conclusion in the preceding chapter that structural crises transform modes of regulation and/or regimes of accumulation in the Régulationist sense, we have to ask ourselves how and why the stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s ultimately fostered the emergence of a new accumulation regime. Elsewhere I have characterized t...

The global crisis following the disintegration of the US securitization machine in 2007/08 proved to be a deep decline, from which the world economy has recovered only haltingly and in uneven fashion. These kinds of crises are far more intense and enduring than any normal business cycle downturn known as recession, a passing phenomenon that we expe...

Having gone through a systemic crisis, finance-led capitalism is at a threshold—and with it the future of global markets. Even though critics on the political Left complain that the crisis has rendered finance even more concentrated and reregulation has left its basic structure intact, much has changed since those fateful days of 2008. Transnationa...

In Finance-Led Capitalism , bestselling author and economist Robert Guttmann provides a new conceptual framework to assess the dominate role of modern finance within the workings of our contemporary economic system. This lively and provocative read will challenge some of the core beliefs about modern finance and the world economy.

In response to the worst crisis since the Great Depression the Federal Reserve undertook a series of different policy measures. These could be divided into two response categories. The first consisted of extensions of traditional monetary-policy tools, which have had to be adjusted and/or ramped up to scale in the face of an unprecedented financial...

While we are still some years away from a universal electronic-payments system that is widely used for e-commerce on the internet, it behoves us to take a closer look at ongoing cybercash experiments. Even in this embryonic stage we can get a glimpse of a future in which cybercash will have become a dominant money form.1

Ever since its inception about 15,000 years ago, money has been subject to ongoing change — both in its form and modus operandi. Such changes have in turn typically brought about major transformations in the functioning of our economy. Given money’s strategic position in the organization of economic activities, it is not surprising to see changes i...

Cybercash has had a difficult birth. Its developers have faced one formidable challenge after another. Privacy and security concerns have made it harder to convince a skeptical public that it can trust a virtual money form flowing invisibly through computer networks. Right from the start credit-card companies managed to establish a commanding lead...

That we have come to the imminent birth of cybercash is rooted not least in the logic of money’s evolution. The history of money is one of its progressive dematerialization, a trend illustrated foremost when metal money gave way to paper money. The latter is now being gradually replaced by an even more immaterial form of money, existing solely as d...

In the preceding chapter we made reference to the notion of monetary regimes. This concept describes an amalgam of institutional arrangements pertaining to the prevailing forms of money, the modalities of their coexistence and the management of their use. Not only can forms of money change, but so can the monetary regimes guiding their creation and...

As the internet assumes a central role in our lives and remakes our economy, it posits major challenges for policy-makers. Its growing presence has already raised serious concerns about privacy protection and safety, complicated the collection of indirect taxes (value-added taxes, sales taxes), enhanced the possibilities for tax evasion or money la...

Even though it is difficult to project forward the course of major innovations, we can make several reasonably safe bets about the evolution of the internet as a locus of economic activity.1 New communication technologies (such as broadband) will eventually give the internet dramatically enhanced performance capabilities in terms of safety and conv...

In the USA and in Britain pension funds have enjoyed spectacular growth in recent decades and they are about to emerge as a major force in the European economies and the »emerging markets« of Asia and Latin America. In the eighties, pension funds often backed hostile takeovers and even provided liquidity for junk bonds. But in the last decade the s...

Money seems to be both: public good and private commodity. This contradictory nature of money necessitates its careful management. Based on these arguments the recent developements concerning money and banking, primarily confined to the United States, are described.and analysed as the disintegration of the Fordist monetary regime. As a result of th...

Das US-Finan\system wurde im Verlauf der 80er Jahre völlig neuen Spielregeln unterworfen, wodurch sich nicht nur die Akkumulationsstruktur und -dynamik der US-Ökonomie sondern auch die der Weltwirtschaft veränderten. Börsenhausse und -zusammenbruch, Finanzinnovationen, stabile Kreditbeziehungen unterminierende Junk bonds, der Aufkauf riesiger Unter...