She attempts to show how the organisation of credit in the world economy has been revolutionized by new ways of marketing credit, new credit instruments and new kinds of financial dealing like derivatives. Strange argues that governments have on control over these innovations: they cannot officially be patented to stop others copying.
Strange highlights the importance of technical innovations used by the banks and in financial dealings; they are shown to have changed the modes of operation of, and the services provided by, financial markets and institutions, and therefore the distribution of structural power in the political economy. She organizes the detailed discussion around computers, chips and satellites.
She also explores how states have lost control over taxation where their spending power is beyond their own control, determined by the whims of foreign bondholders and by the agilty of buisness leaders in using tax havens to pay less.
An interesting discussion of money laundering too. Whether we take the profits from drug trafficking or illegal immigration, the forces of the market are shown to overwhelm the efforts of national police and custom officials.
She then explores how financial inventiveness has made possible a spate of mergers and acquistions. The security provided by size in a competitive global market also creates the need of big firms for large amounts of credit. She then subtly analyzes the problems of moral contamination therefrom.
Finally she explores throughout new forms of inequality, including at the international level. Here she argues that the supposed decline of US hegemony was never more than a myth and is even more of one today than it used to be. Reiterating her conclusion in Casino Capitalism (1986), Strange argues again that US will be able to use its bargaining power as military protector, or interventionist meddler or as a major trading partner to get its own way and to make others undergo painful adjustments in case of depression from deflationary bias. But she argues that in the end American multinationals would not be able to stay rich for long in an impoverished world.
Yours, Rakesh