Keynesian Fordism, Neoliberal Financialization and the Restructuring of the Economy : A Survey of the Data

This working paper, a follow-up to "Keynesian Fordism and Neoliberal Financialization: A Comparison of Economic Models," moves from that paper's prior emphasis on describing the economic model associated with "financialization" to considering the matter quantitatively, examining the patterns of data in regard to investment, asset accumulation, value added, GDP share and contributions to international trade of the manufacturing and FIRE (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) sectors, respectively, as these evolved between the 1940s and the present, and in particular the shift in the pattern between the Keynesian Fordist heyday of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and the increasingly neoliberalized character of economic life in the 1980s and after. In doing so it demonstrates how from the standpoint of all these the place of manufacturing receded significantly and the place of FIRE (and especially Finance and Insurance) expanded significantly, while also noting, not least given the trade deficits the situation produced (given the consistent failure of the country's trade surplus in services to approach, let alone match, its massive deficits in the trade of goods, and especially manufactured goods), massive debt accumulation. The paper also examines the shift in the burden of debt accumulation with the drastically expanded debt load increasingly borne by the public sector rather than the private, and explains how this came to be the case within the framework of neoliberalism