financialization

The shift away from manufacturing toward money games that Jiang bluntly glosses as gambling under reserve-currency pressure.

A sign of decline where the financial economy booms while the real economy of jobs and production deteriorates.

A phase where capitalism prioritizes financial returns and speculation over creating goods, jobs, and real wealth.

The shift from building useful productive enterprises to investing wealth because financial returns outpace manufacturing returns.

The imperial-decline explanation says empire destabilizes through financialization, demographic crisis, and elite overproduction, then projects its internal struggle outward as war.

Jiang argues that reserve-currency status damages America by forcing it to print liquidity for the world, tolerate an open capital account, and shift from manufacturing toward financialization.

Reserve-currency status taxes and strains the issuing economy because it must absorb global liquidity, inflation, and financialization.

After the unipolar moment, Jiang says America shifted manufacturing to China, focused on finance, and thereby set up the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.

Subprime lending became possible through Clinton-era minority homeownership policy and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall, which combined retail and investment banking and encouraged riskier financial vehicles.

He treats financialization as a sign of decline because stock markets and asset owners boom while real work, productivity, and ordinary jobs decline.

Financialization explains decline as capitalism moving from consumer wealth creation to financial speculation and then monopoly, where money grows faster than the real economy.

In Jiang's summary, Marx, Piketty, and Carroll Quigley all read capitalism as crisis-bound because production, finance, and monopoly eventually detach wealth from useful work.