The Fall and Rise of American Finance: from J.P. Morgan to Blackrock

How Wall Street concocted a more volatile and dangerous capitalism

The Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan’s vast empire to the rise of finance behemoth BlackRock. Contrary to what is taken for common sense by figures from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, Maher and Aquanno insist that financialization did not imply the hollowing out of the “real” economy or the retreat of the state. Rather, it served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, profits, and the exploitation of labor—with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.

Stephen Maher is Associate Editor of the Socialist Register and author of Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power (Palgrave, 2022). He is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Canada.

Scott M. Aquanno is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ontario Tech University, and a Visiting Associate at the Global Labour Research Centre at York University.  He is the author of Crisis of Risk: Subprime Debt and US Financial Power from 1944 to Present (Edward Elgar, 2021).