Financialisation of non-financial corporations, globalization and capital accumulation

Financialisation at the firm level highlights the changes in the behaviours of the managers of non-financial corporations and their new relations with the financial markets. Non-financial corporations have been increasingly investing in financial assets and creating own financial subsidiaries, deriving increasing shares of their income from this kind of pure financial activities. These transformations, in close synergy with the evolution in corporate governance that has emphasised the ‘pursuit of shareholder value’, have produced radical changes in the objectives of top managements, favouring an increasing propensity to short-termism in corporate investment decision-making. Moreover, financial globalization, multiplying the range of available financial instruments and creating new ways to access the high profits produced in the emerging markets, could play a role also in changing the portfolio composition of non-financial corporations, contributing to reduce their national real investment, with significant effects on the growth rate and the unemployment rate of developed countries. The paper deals with some contributions that analyse the effects of corporate governance and strategic behaviours on portfolio management and investment decisions in big non-financial corporations, seeking to determine how these effects might play a role in producing growing liquidity holdings and financialisation, and how they can be influenced by the new opportunities created by free movements of capital and the economic dynamics of the emerging countries.