[...] no description of the postmodern can omit the centrality of the postmodern economy, which can succinctly be characterized as the displacement of old-fashioned industrial production by finance capital.

I follow Giovanni Arrighi in seeing the emergence of a stage of finance capital as a cyclical process: as Fernand Braudel memorably put it, ‘reaching the stage of financial expansion’, every capitalist development ‘in some sense announces its maturity’; finance capital ‘is a sign of autumn’. Arrighi’s three cyclical stages can then be summarized as: the implantation of capitalism in a new region; its development and the gradual saturation of the regional market; the desperate recourse of a capital that no longer finds productive investment to speculation and the ‘fictitious’ profits of the stock market. [...]