Stocks For All People S Capitalism In The Twenty First Century

Public stock markets are too small. This book is an effort to rescue public stock markets in the EU and the US. There should be more companies with publicly-traded shares and more direct share ownership. Anchored in a broad historical study of the regulation of stock markets and companies in Europe and the US, the book proposes ways to create a new regulatory regime designed to help firms and facilitate people’s capitalism. Through its comparative and historical study of regulation and legal practices, the book helps to understand the evolution of public stock markets from the nineteenth century to the present day. The book identifies design principles that reflect prior regulation. While continental European company law has produced many enduring design principles, the recent regulation of stock markets in the EU and the US has failed to serve the needs of both firms and retail investors. The book therefore proposes a new set of design principles to serve contemporary societal needs.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In this work the author analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. He shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values if political action is not taken. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, the author says, and may do so again. This original work reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

Public stock markets are too small. This book is an effort to rescue public stock markets in the EU and the US. There should be more companies with publicly-traded shares and more direct share ownership. Anchored in a broad historical study of the regulation of stock markets and companies in Europe and the US, the book proposes ways to create a new regulatory regime designed to help firms and facilitate people’s capitalism. Through its comparative and historical study of regulation and legal practices, the book helps to understand the evolution of public stock markets from the nineteenth century to the present day. The book identifies design principles that reflect prior regulation. While continental European company law has produced many enduring design principles, the recent regulation of stock markets in the EU and the US has failed to serve the needs of both firms and retail investors. The book therefore proposes a new set of design principles to serve contemporary societal needs.

Winner of the first Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities-the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone-and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a major contribution to the theorization and critique of global capitalism.

An introduction to Thomas Piketty’s monumental work US Nobel Prize–winner Paul Krugman described Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as “perhaps the most important book of the last decade.” It has sparked major international debates, dominated bestseller lists and generated a level of enthusiasm—as well as intense criticism—in a way no other economic or sociological work has in a long time. Piketty has been described as a new Karl Marx and placed in the same league as the economist John Maynard Keynes. The “rock star economist’s” underlying thesis is that inequality under capitalism has reached dramatic levels in the last few decades and continues to grow—and that this is not by chance. A small elite is making itself richer and richer and acquiring everincreasing levels of power. Given the sensational reception of Piketty’s not-so-easily digested 800-page study, the question as to where the hype around the book comes from deserves to be asked. What does it get right? And what should we make of it—both of the book itself and of the criticism it has received? This introduction lays out the argument of Piketty’s monumental work in a compact and understandable format, while also investigating the controversies Piketty has stirred up. In addition, the two authors demonstrate the limits, contradictions and errors of the so-called Piketty revolution.

"... Heilbroner sets out to tell us where capitalism will go in the years to come. In order to do that properly, he first shows us where capitalism has been: in these lectures he provides an overview both of what capitalism is and what it is not, shows us how the market system works and only then discusses what he believes might happen in capitalism's future." -box

Reflecting on the end of communism, the author of the best-selling The Worldly Philosophers examines the many faces of capitalism, looking for the aspects of a market economy that will be most capable of succeeding against today's toughest dilemmas.

More than ten years after the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the financial sector is thriving. But something is deeply wrong. Taxpayers bore the burden of bailing out “too big to fail” banks, but got nothing in return. Inequality has soared, and a populist backlash against elites has shaken the foundations of our political order. Meanwhile, financial capitalism seems more entrenched than ever. What is the left to do? Justice Is an Option uses those problems—and the framework of finance that created them—to reimagine historical justice. Robert Meister returns to the spirit of Marx to diagnose our current age of finance. Instead of closing our eyes to the political and economic realities of our era, we need to grapple with them head-on. Meister does just that, asking whether the very tools of finance that have created our vastly unequal world could instead be made to serve justice and equality. Meister here formulates nothing less than a democratic financial theory for the twenty-first century—one that is equally conversant in political philosophy, Marxism, and contemporary politics. Justice Is an Option is a radical, invigorating first page of a new—and sorely needed—leftist playbook.