The "market for corporate control" sparked by the hostile acquisitions of the 1980s was another cause of the financialization of American corporations, and financial economics played only a minor part in the emergence of this market. (See the discussion of Michael Milken above.) The wider political and economic changes both symbolized and encouraged by the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the accommodation with those changes reached in the 1990s by the Democrats were clearly important too. Free-market economics was of obvious importance to those changes, but financial economics specifically did not play a prominent role.

Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, loc. 1175