Falling profits, rather than increasing financial investment, led to decreasing rates of capital accumulation by American companies

The rate of capital accumulation in the USA has fallen markedly in recent decades. The financialization and shareholder value literatures argue that the cause is a diversion of profits from productive investment towards financial markets and investments. Shannon Williams and Andrew Kliman show that such arguments are not supported by the data and that the fall in US corporations’ rate of profit explains why the rate of capital accumulation fell.