When Even Conservatives Call Finance a Grift
Something is shifting when a conservative economist in the New York Times starts calling the finance industry a grift.
For forty years we were told that finance was the brain of the economy: the allocator of capital, the rational core. Industry, labour and public services were expected to orbit around it. If factories closed, if wages stagnated, if towns hollowed out, that was simply the market working through its logic.
Banks no longer fund production at scale. Private equity loads firms with debt, strips what can be stripped, and sells them on. Hedge funds skim. Profit comes less from making things than from owning claims on what others make: fees on movement, interest on survival, rent on everything that can be enclosed.
When profitable productive investment declines, capital does not retire. It turns inward. It cannibalises. Hospitals become revenue streams. Housing becomes an asset class. Infrastructure becomes collateral. Everyday life is reorganised around debt servicing and subscription extraction. Every surface monetised. Every interaction squeezed for margin.
Your grandmother’s care home is owned by a holding company registered in Luxembourg. The water company that flooded her street last winter pays dividends to shareholders in Canada while sewage runs into British rivers. The NHS trust treating her is servicing PFI debt that will outlive most of the people currently working in it. This is what finance does when it runs out of factories to close.
A layer of conservative thinkers now calls for a return to “productive capitalism”, the era when finance supposedly served industry and national development. This is fantasy. The post-war settlement they mourn rested on conditions that no longer exist: strong unions, capital controls, cheap energy, and the unchallenged industrial dominance of the United States. Once those conditions eroded, capital reverted to type. Financialisation was not a policy error but a system adjusting to declining returns in production by extracting more from circulation.
When even the right starts calling finance parasitic, legitimacy is cracking. Sections of the dominant class are beginning to turn on one another as the pool of real growth shrinks.
Workers should not mistake this for conversion. These conservatives are not abandoning capitalism. They are arguing over how best to stabilise it.
Still, the moment matters. The veil is thinner than it has been in decades. When defenders of the system start admitting the engine is rigged, the question is no longer whether finance is a grift. It is how much longer the rest of us are expected to live inside it.
Against capital, against empire, against forgetting.
Notes and essays from the wreckage of the present.
And of course the prosperity in the Global North was always funded by extraction and exploitation of the Global South, as Rosa Luxemberg demonstrated over a hundred years ago.
Now the game is coming to an end, the peak has passed and the long decline is underway.
Our only hope is basic human nature: people always come together and help each other in times of crisis and scarcity, as can be seen in community responses to climate stresses. Our job now is to extend that throughout society and crack down on the greedy rich bastards in charge.
How best to stabilise it indeed.