Financialisation and the slowdown of accumulation

Over the past decades, the financial investment of non-financial businesses has been rising, and the accumulation of capital goods has been declining. The first part of the paper offers a novel theory to explain this phenomenon. Financialisation, the shareholder revolution and the development of a market for corporate control have shifted power to shareholders and thus changed management priorities, leading to a reduction in the desired growth rate. In the second part, the link between accumulation and financialisation is tested econometrically by means of a time series analysis of aggregate business investment for the USA, the UK, France and Germany. Extensive tests of robustness are performed. For the first…