Financialisation as Monopoly Profit: The Case of US Banking Brett Christophers Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; brett.christophers@kultgeog.uu.se Abstract: Different economic measures afford different ways of seeing processes of financialisation. In the prototypical case of the US economy, the most compelling evi- dence of post-1970s financialisation is found in corporate profits measures. This much has been clear for at least a decade. What remains much less clear, however, is the explanation for the long-term maintenance and amplification of extreme financial-sector profitability that financialisation in the United States has and continues to entail. With a specific focus on banking, this article turns to post-Marxian scholarship on profit rate trends to explain this phenomenon. It argues that limited and declining levels of compe- tition within the US banking sector during recent decades—rooted in high levels of industry concentration, collusive behaviour, and substantial entry barriers—have con- tributed to sustaining and boosting abnormal sectoral profitability. In doing so, the arti- cle theorises financialisation in the United States explicitly in terms of monopoly profit. Keywords: financialisation, United States, profit, competition, monopoly, capitalism Introduction The financialisation of the economy is widely recognised as one of the most sig- nificant political-economic developments of the past four decades across much of the global North. Of those national economies that are said to have financialised, the United States represents the archetypal, benchmark case. And although there have been numerous studies of the growing financialisation of the US economy (e.g. D€ unhaupt 2012; Epstein and Jayadev 2005; Orhangazi 2008; Palley 2013), Greta Krippner’s (2005) meticulous and comprehensive empirical demonstration of the phenomenon arguably remains the exemplary—and is certainly the most cited—analysis. In the 13 years since Krippner’s study was published, however, something strange, if not exactly surprising, has happened. The specificity of her argument has largely faded. Krippner’s analysis is frequently invoked as a demonstration of the increased importance of finance in the US economy in a generalised sense— as illustrating, for instance, “three decades of spectacular growth of the financial sector” (Block and Keller 2009:477), or “a shift from commodity production to finance production” (Newman 2009:316), or “the growing power of private financial actors in the American political economy” (Soederberg 2010:34). But it was not that. Or at least, it was not exactly that. The crux of Krippner’s thesis was in fact very precise. It concerned “where profits are generated in the US economy” (2005:175). She defined financialisation as “a pattern of accumulation in which Antipode Vol. 50 No. 4 2018 ISSN 0066-4812, pp. 864–890 doi: 10.1111/anti.12383 ª 2018 The Author. Antipode ª 2018 Antipode Foundation Ltd. A Radical Journal of Geography