File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9801, message 222


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




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