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In recent years, the competition law community has become absorbed in discussions around the dominance of the largest digital platform companies: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. Such discussions, for example about the meaning of power in the digital age, have helped to shift the field beyond its narrow focus on price and output effects. Yet, a crucial dimension is missing from the vast majority of commentary on competition law and the digital economy: the role of financialisation. Financialisation—understood as the hypertrophy and increased volatility of the financial sector, together with the reorientation of corporate governance around the principle of shareholder value maximisation—has important implications for the competitive strategies of the Big Tech companies, as well as who benefits from their economic power. Presenting quantitative findings on the corporate governance regimes of the Big Tech platforms, and drawing on insights from corporate law and heterodox economics, this chapter represents an attempt to integrate a financial capitalism perspective into the competition law analysis of digital markets.
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism develops a new approach to the history of capitalism and inequality by using the concept of impunity to show how financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters. Trevor Jackson examines the legal regulation of capital markets in a period of unprecedented expansion in the complexity of finance ranging from the bankruptcy of Europe's richest man in 1709, to the world's first stock market crash in 1720, to the first Latin American debt crisis in 1825. He shows how, after each crisis, popular anger and improvised policy responses resulted in efforts to create a more just financial capitalism but succeeded only in changing who could act with impunity, and how. Henceforth financial crises came to seem normal and legitimate, caused by impersonal international markets, with the costs borne by domestic populations and nobody in particular at fault.
Through a combination of external forces and its inner dynamics financial capitalism has been transformed over the last 250 years. Central to financial capitalism is financial innovation. It is through innovation that financial capitalism responds to external challenges and opportunities while generating its inner dynamics. The most important organizational innovation in finance was the bank. A bank is a financial intermediary whereas a moneylender is a capitalist. Almost from the inception of financial innovation in products, markets, and organization, attempts were made to minimize the risks that they posed for all users. Regulatory innovation was also found in financial markets, though much again was left to the reputation of the participants. Evidence certainly exists to suggest there is a strong correlation between a country's per capita income and financial sector development, judged by such measures as bank deposits and holding of securities.
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