Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 16:52:59 -0800 (PST) From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu> Subject: M-TH: Re: MANDEL, DOUG AND BODDHI On Sun, 11 Jan 1998, Doug Henwood wrote: > U.S. rentiers and managers don't have the patience for these kinds of > investments - they want double-digit returns, and quickly. No doubt there > are institutional and historical reasons for what looks to mainstream > observers like a "cultural" preference - but it's an empirical fact. I'm > wondering, though, about the kinds of effects that these investment > preferences have on the outside world. The secondary metropoles that were > once seen as the gainers on a falling U.S. - Japan and Western Europe - > have been/are being forced to give up all their institutional arrangements > that helped sustain their profitability and time preferences. Is part of > the reason for that the generalization of the American financial model - > which comes packaged with a set of ownership and governance arrangements - > to worldwide dominance? Hmm. Tough question. On the one hand, the evidence is pretty inconclusive that the Japanese and Central European accumulation models are coming apart at the seams. Most of the fundamental elements of such are still in place, the Japanese keiretsu continue to own each other's shares, the German banking sector continues to super-concentrate, etc. On the other hand, they are changing rather quickly into a more American mode of doing things. To put it another way, there's been a dramatic shift away from indigenous accumulation and towards genuinely multinational accumulation, a.k.a. overseas FDI and the like. Interestingly, this is not just in manufacturing: more Japanese FDI has flowed into services than factories, if I recall the statistics rightly. It may be that the EU/Nippo-metropoles are currently bursting the bonds of the traditional, nation-centric development states, and that this expansion is being misread by Wall Street as a validation of the American way of doing things. After all, Deutsche Bank and its ilk have been buying up British and American investment banks, not the other way around; possibly, the Anglo-Saxon accounting model is one of the proliferating forms of cultural capital (to grievously misquote Bourdieu) which Angloid bond traders or other speculators have dreamed up to sell to their new masters. Multinational corporate necessity is the mother of Wall Street invention. -- Dennis --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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