Today, finance is not only centralized, but managed by a few massively leveraged institutions whose failure threaten the entire financial system. This centralization and the dynamic of social losses/private profits that's baked into the stew, argues against efficiency and has indeed resulted in a massive and criminal inefficiency.
But perhaps I'm not understanding your question. For one, I don't see how one can undo the twining of centralization and neo-liberal policy of the last thirty years.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- A quick note out of nowhere.
For whatever reason, I've had to read a number of papers on the so-called phenomenon of "financialization," and nowhere have I found mention of Marx's insightful point that the development of modern banking and financial organizations entails the centralization of myriad functions that, otherwise, individual capitals would have to perform, but much less efficiently (i.e. with a greater expense of society's surplus labor globally considered). This centralization accomplished by modern centralized finance -- Marx noted -- tends to reduce the faux frais (the waste of surplus labor time) of capitalist reproduction regarded as a totality. In our times, one has to view Wall Street, the City of London, and to a lesser extent Zurich, Tokyo, Frankfurt, etc. as rationalizing an enormity of minute transactions that, without the "scale economies" in question, would require an enormous expenditure of global surplus labor time scattered across the system. Now, this is a structural phenomenon, separate from the cycles, generally speaking. Here, I mean e.g. that the gradual dismantling of Bretton Woods, which spanned the forex financial boom from the 1970s on, that later on managed to undo Glass-Steagall, etc. further expanding the "industry," has to be distinguished from the secular process of centralization and economy of surplus value that Marx referred to as linked to the development of modern finance.
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