In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E. R. A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.

Within the postwar financial regulatory system, state-level regulations—particularly interest rate limits—constrained the profitability of bank credit card plans. But differences in law among the states allowed motivated institutions to circumvent local laws using these mobile financial instruments. Eventually, banks themselves became mobile, placing irresistible pressure on states to eliminate local restrictions on consumer finance. The critical moment came when Citibank relocated its credit card business to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1981. By examining this move in its longer context, this essay provides a new perspective on the rise of consumer finance in the late twentieth century, one that emphasizes strategic manipulation of local law by firms pursuing a national customer base.

Following some general remarks on the impact of financialization on nonfinancial sectors of the economy, this article identifies common misconceptions about the German and American varieties of capitalism. It then outlines the post-1960 U.S. experience with financialization, including the reasons for the rise of financialization and its main consequences. The article will then look at Germany, a country with a very different entry point into the world of financialization, and ask when and to what degree the concept was adopted. Finally, a detailed case study of Siemens—one of Germany's largest industrial concerns—will explore how this icon of Germany Inc. adapted to the demands of financialization and coped with the external changes caused by globalization, deregulation, and digitalization.

Are reference works still needed in this age of digital reproduction, when there are more than five million English language entries in Wikipedia? Their function has changed, surely. With so much information available online, printed reference books need higher justifications, not merely the collection and collocation of information, but presenting it in new and imaginative ways that give its users insights, as well as a pleasurable reading experience. In other words, reference works need to become reference books.

The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.