At the end of the Bretton Woods era, when the United States finally went off gold in 1971, states around the world had to adjust to what Eric Helleiner has called "the reemergence of global finance." Floating exchange rates, deregulation, disintermediation, and the rest, which made finance the most profitable sector of the American and British economies by the 2000s, was the new order of things. But what was it all really based upon? After all, finance is most properly thought of as a part of the information system of the economy: linking borrowers and lenders while sitting in the middle collecting a fee. It's not an industry in the traditional sense, and it certainly should not have been producing 40 percent of corporate profits in the United States on the eve of the crisis—so why was it able to do just that?

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 624