Toward investee's capitalism

Thirty years ago, capitalism shifted from a civic-industrial compromise to an industrial-market compromise. It may now be on the eve of morphing into a civic-market one. To understand why and how this could happen, we analyze the legitimacy crisis of capitalism and explore a possible outcome. This crisis is considered as a crisis of the legitimacy of financial markets, stemming from a gap between their justification and characteristics of the goods traded on it, i.e. financial assets. We first show the lack of any intrinsic utility of these goods makes the markets where they are traded impossible to legitimize within a market order. Then their legitimation within the industrial order or an industrial-market compromise is described as highly problematic. Given these difficulties, we narrow the focus on the question of the legitimation of the valuation of financial assets. Their dual nature of both tradable and representative items makes us suggest a civic-market compromise, which would make finance more symmetrical by making valuation political. We then show such a perspective is obscured by the pervasive strength of the investor's point of view, but also that the mounting debates on public and private debt may provide opportunities for the development of such an “investee's capitalism”.