>ok, so in effect, leaving aside what might well be important details,
>people are more or less saying that the degree to which capital is
>concentrated in ownership, brought together through credit, or at least
>where credit takes on the role of setting the terrain for individual
>capitals, capital is 'socialised', in the sense of allowing capital and
>labour (say, as represented by unions) to confront eachother within a
>certain bargaining framework, more prone to the pressures of
>social/industrial policy, etc???
It's all credit, but the institutional details (and social relations) are different. When firms are owned by banks - or at least banks own enough of their shares to control them - they're somewhat insulated from pressures to maximize profit and more amenable to regulation and political/union pressure. When firms are owned mainly by stockholders, who can sell at a moment's notice, there's much greater pressure to maximize profits, because each stock is under constant evaluation relative to its peers. Stockholder-owned firms are also much more vulnerable to takeover, since any entity with the money can buy shares & cause trouble; takeovers have until recently been rare in Germany (and the rest of non-UK Europe).
>but an additional question i'd have would be which country other than
>the US did not entail a central banking system, at least at some
>distinctive point? germany, singapore, australia, japan, malaysia,
>indonesia... i'm trying to think of some which are more like the US, but
>these aren't, and they certainly don't all fall within the left of any
>continuum as described by the article.
The stock-centered countries are mainly the predominantly English-speaking ones. The bank systems are those like much of continental Europe and, in part Japan. Japan has also been characterized by firms cross-holding each others' shares, particularly companies in the same group, or who do extensive business with each other. Only about 1/3 of the stock in Japan has historically been freely traded - the rest is accounted for by banks and cross-holders. So there's been no active takeover market there either. This is all changing, with the euro, and with some lightening of the cross-holdings in Japan - but there's still a long way to go.
>and, it seems to me that the conditions being described in the US miss
>the specific character of the US globally.
The U.S. been very eagerly promoting the Americanization of global finance through the IMF, WB, and the rest of the gang. Latin America has been heavily reconstructed in U.S. fashion, and that was the dream for Asia, but the dream is not yet realized.
Doug