The Ethics of Banking: Conclusions from the Financial Crisis (Issues ...

The Globalization of the Capital Market 33
– Liberalization of financial markets,
– Transboundary ecological hazards,
– Transnational fusions,
– Mass media dissemination of western (consumer) models,
– Growing migration flows,
– Declining effectiveness of national policy. 1
Müller puts the liberalization of financial markets at the head of his list, and indeed,
the liberalization, internationalization and expansion of financial markets has to
be described as the most powerful driving force of the process of globalization.
Another common factor to all the features of the process of globalization mentioned
is the increasing, non-place-dependent, ubiquitous access to knowledge. People’s
decision-making space and decision-making time became global because knowledge
about the entire world is available more rapidly than in past eras and can
be documented on digital media. 2 Conversely, we can only perceive globalization
because our information systems provide us with momentary knowledge of
the global reality, or at least parts of it. With the Internet and the globalization of
information, the earlier disparity – indeed, the hiatus – between the center and the
periphery of knowledge is increasingly being leveled off or even negated. The catalogues
of the world’s great libraries have become accessible even from the remotest
village in the world, as long as it has a telephone line.
What is meant by the social debordering of financial institutions? In 1976, Peter
Drucker published his book on “pension fund socialism”. 3 As far back as the 1970s
the pension funds were already bringing about a socialization of investment. They
forged ahead with a tendency, already identified by Marx in the joint-stock company,
to sever the relationship between capital ownership and managing a firm. Whether
or not pension fund capitalism is actually equivalent to real socialism can be put
aside for now. The fact is, however, that the pension and investment funds led to a
previously unseen widening of the class of capital owners – 56% of households in
the USA own corporate shares – and that they comprise an element of socialization
of the ownership of means of production and drive forward the debordering of the
capital market.
Another “driver” of the expansion of the capital market is a further trend observed
since the 1980s: many employees in the USA engage in stock market speculation
in the attempt to top up their income and generate a second income. 4 All four tendencies
mentioned caused a debordering of the capital market with the effect of a
1 KLAUS MÜLLER: Globalisierung, Frankfurt, New York (Campus) 2002.
2 ROBERT J. SHILLER: Irrational Exuberance, Princeton and Oxford (Princeton University Press)
6th edn. 2001, points out that the laying of the first transatlantic telephone cable had a similar
effect to the Internet. Crucially, however, unlike the telephone, the Internet enables instantaneous,
documentable information transfer.
3 PETER DRUCKER: The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America,New
York (Harper and Row) 1976.
4 The significance of this desire to augment one’s income with a second income from capital market
investment and speculation has been pointed out primarily by SHILLER (2001).