A pénzpiacok és a középrétegek. A kollektív Buddenbrook-effektus
The Financial Markets and the Middle Class: The Collective Buddenbrooks-Effect

Summary/Abstract: The paper views the current financial crisis in light of long-term structural socioeconomic changes in advanced industrial societies. In Western Europe, the United States and Japan, the period of economic prosperity after the Second World War led to a remarkable accumulation of wealth among the middle class that had surprisingly little effect on the substantial fortunes of the wealthiest upper class. This affluence gave rise to pension and investment funds, emerging as a new type of collective actor in global financial markets, while the economy was characterized by increasing instability, declining growth rates and financial crises. The paper tries to clarify the interconnections between these phenomena, using the framework of a multilevel analysis that culminates in a model that the author calls the „collective Buddenbrooks effect” („Buddenbrooks” being a family saga by Thomas Mann). Structural upward social mobility will lead to an increasing imbalance in capital markets, since the volume of financial assets looking for profitable investment will rise as the social reservoir of solvent debtors and promising investment opportunities decline. Advanced industrial economies are thus characterized by a bias towards capital export and excessive financial liquidity, with the well-known consequences of low economic growth rates and the danger of speculative bubbles on global capital markets. The middle class that originally benefited from postwar prosperity is negatively affected, too. The author argues that the current crisis cannot be understood sufficiently without taking this structural socioeconomic background into account.

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