The Age of Unproductive Capital: New Architectures of Power
This book offers a very direct and readable analysis of the main challenges facing our societies today, such as reducing inequality, protecting the planet, and in particular mobilizing our financial resources which linger in tax havens and feed speculation, instead of funding the sustainable development we need. It precisely considers the most important factors, including corporate governance, financialization, capturing political power, and the limits to adequate national economic policies in a world dominated by global finance. The book’s presentation of how sensible and productive policies are dismantled will be highly interesting for the international community, whether in the academic, corporate or government spheres.
Ladislau Dowbor is a Full Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a consultant in development planning for different governments and institutions, mainly in Brazil, but also in Africa and in other Latin American countries. He has published over a dozen single-authored books, and over fifty in collaboration with other writers. His publications include Formation du capitalisme au Brésil; A Reprodução Social; The Broken Mosaic: For an Economics beyond Equations; Transitions to Sustainability; and A Era do Capital Improdutivo.
“[This book is] a revealing and deeply informed study of the enormous power that has accrued to financial institutions and the deleterious impact on the global economy as financial transactions drain the economy and undercut productive investment. Dowbor’s focus is on the Brazilian experience, analyzed with care and insight, but the implications, as he clearly shows, are global in scope. [It is a] very important contribution.”
(Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
“Pre-eminent Brazilian economist Ladislau Dowbor accounts in excellent detail how Brazil’s homegrown banks were taken over by big European and US banks as “cash cows”! This takeover exacerbated structural inequities in the Brazilian economy by increasing already unnecessarily high interest rates. For example, they purposely promoted consumer lending by fraudulently advertising their exorbitant annual rates in monthly terms to deceive unwary buyers of durable household appliances.”
(Hazel Henderson, Ethical Markets, 2019)
Ladislav Dowbor
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