Conclusion: the Victory of Dividends and the Dividends of Victory

Abstract

To return to Max Weber’s quote with which this book began, great banks and stock exchanges are not places for ‘ethical culture’ but weapons for achieving power in a national economic struggle for this-worldly goals.² The US promotion of direct financing in the postwar period has been fundamental to its extension of structural power in international finance. Direct financing greatly assisted the US to achieve — in the most literal sense of profit returned from investment — a ‘victory of dividends’. And for Washington, Wall Street, and the American public, the ‘dividends of victory’ were worth procuring. As a consequence of this ‘victory’ the US was able to extend financial and monetary privileges over its major trading partners. US intermediaries were able to shape an international financial system that provided ongoing profits and rewarded their role as innovators. The privileges afforded to American society were also extraordinary, including increased access to consumer credit, which allowed increased consumption such as homeownership. Of course the counterpart of increased consumer credit was increased indebtedness. Altogether, however, the US has increased its financial privileges, including indebtedness, with little costs to itself because of its structural power in international finance.

The bankers and capitalist entrepreneurs they hate so much would then have unlimited and uncontrolled command over the state! For who on earth is the ‘state’, as distinct from this machinery of large and small capitalist cartels of every kind into which the economy is to be ‘organised’, if the formation of the state’s own will (Willensbildung) is to be placed in the hands of precisely these ‘co-operative’ organisations?

Max Weber¹