"Finance, Big Tech and the Far Right"

Book

Much research has focused on the question of how financial market dynamics have contributed to the rise of the far right. However, as the far right increasingly gains in vote shares across Europe and North America, a new question arises: how will these parties govern financial markets once in office?

This book project examines financial governance as pursued by the administrations of Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, and Viktor Orbán, as well as that envisioned by the AfD. The project asks three core questions: How can we conceptualize emerging far-right financial regimes beyond their often reflexive categorization as neoliberal governance? What functions do these novel forms of financial governance have within the wider development of contemporary capitalism? And how have financial-market developments over the past 30 years—including the rise of asset managers, Big Tech, and venture capital funds—contributed to their emergence?

Article

Besides the book project, I have written an article (here in working paper format) which assesses how far-right parties in nine Western economies (US, UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France, Greece, and Italy) developed a range of different financial-governance approaches in response to recent structural changes within financial markets. This article is based on a fuzzy-set-inspired database of policy intentions in the realms of financial regulation, financial transaction taxes, corporate governance, takeover regulation, credit and capital market policies.

The article shows that the rise of asset-manager capitalism since the early 2000s critically shaped the emergence of different approaches to far-right financial governance. Asset-manager capitalism is a novel financial order in which financial power has become increasingly concentrated in a handful of giant financial institutions—such as institutional asset managers BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, but also private-equity firms. These institutions not only increasingly dominate global financial markets, but also extract value from productive activity and reallocate global financial rents, savings, and corporate control across borders. For instance, alternative asset managers—hedge funds and private equity firms—extract value through buyouts, restructuring, or asset stripping, concentrating returns and corporate control in the hands of enormous financial firms, often based in financial hubs. At the same time, institutional asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street pool vast amounts of savings from a wide range of economies, redirecting them disproportionately toward a narrower set of deep and liquid markets—particularly in Anglo-American economies.

The concentration and reallocation of financial resources across borders is politically explosive and has pushed far-right financial governance strategies in different directions across countries. The country group which I call the credit-market cyclers (far-right parties in Italy, Greece and France) has experienced the rise of asset-manager capitalism as a threat to domestic capital accumulation, as foreign private-equity takeovers increased and savings were increasingly channeled abroad. These parties have sought a highly interventionist and credit-market-based approach which attempts to anchor capital in the domestic economy. The asset manager globalists (in the US, the UK, and Switzerland), on the other hand, have experienced the rise of asset-manager capitalism as having a positive impact on their economies because many of the dominant financial institutions are domestically headquartered. They double down on financial market deregulation and implement new policies which support private equity and asset management. Finally, the capital-market cyclers (far-right parties in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands) experienced the rise of asset managers in ambivalent ways and seek to support a deeper integration of domestic capital markets by channeling domestic savings into ETFs while ensuring that capital returns to the domestic economy.