One more on Krippner

From the Harvard University Press, in their page on Krippner's 2012 book Capitalizing on Crisis:

In Capitalizing on Crisis, Greta Krippner traces the longer-term historical evolution that made the rise of finance possible, arguing that this development rested on a broader transformation of the U.S. economy than is suggested by the current preoccupation with financial speculation.

Krippner argues that state policies that created conditions conducive to financialization allowed the state to avoid a series of economic, social, and political dilemmas that confronted policymakers as postwar prosperity stalled beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s. In this regard, the financialization of the economy was not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers, but rather an inadvertent result of the state’s attempts to solve other problems.

 

• "a broader transformation" -- Yes. So de-financialization will require more reversals of policy that anyone recognizes.
  
  
• "beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s" -- Sounds right to me. Except I think the slowing of prosperity in the late 1960s was itself a result of the expansion of finance in the 1950s and early '60s (and maybe since the Civil War, though I'm not ready to make that argument).
  
  
• "not a deliberate outcome sought by policymakers" -- I've not read the book, but I agree with this conclusion. These days everybody thinks of government as the bad guy. God, that's tiresome. What I think is that policy was  not effective (and had unintended consequences, per Krippner) because policymakers misunderstood (and continue to misunderstand) the problem. Vested interests interfere with understanding, and skew outcomes in unsustainable directions.