Philosophers and economists have decried the parasitical effect of finance on productive economic activity. Plato opens his Republic with an exchange challenging the idea that one should always repay one’s debts. Adam Smith argued for attacks on landlords’ entrenched privileges, while Keynes called for the “euthanasia of the rentier.” This narrative is still prominent today. Indeed, many modern economists argue that we are entering an era of “rentier capitalism,” in which financial capitalists thrive at the expense of good, productive industrialists.

And they have a point. There is mounting evidence that an ever-increasing portion of economic output is accruing to those who gain their money from unproductive economic rents — that is, from monopolizing inputs to production and charging above-market rates for their use. The “rentier share” increased from 4 percent to 14 percent of total income between 1970 and 2000. Financial profits increased by a similar magnitude over the same period. These trends are linked: much of finance’s modern activity is little more than rentierism.

But any analysis that sees financialization as a “perversion” of a purer, more productive form of capitalism fails to grasp the real context. What has emerged in the global economy in recent decades is a new model of capitalism, one that is far more integrated than simple dichotomies suggest. As we pass the tenth anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis, developing conceptual tools to understand financialized capitalism is vital to building strategies to overcome it.