Financial Crisis and Economic Stability: A Comparison between Finance Capitalism and Money Manager Capitalism

Capitalism evolves through stages that differ in institutional structure and policy regime. Finance is crucial to understanding an economic system but other institutional factors are important too. This paper compares finance capitalism with money manager capitalism on the basis of a number of features. Despite the fact that these two stages represent unique periods of evolution, the paper shows that these two stages of capitalism are much alike. This suggests that the current period's financial instability should be expected, and that public policy measures meant to address financial crisis may have to resemble those of the midtwentieth century Keynesian period.