The (Over)Cost of Capital: Financialization and Nonfinancial Corporations in France (1961–2011)

The term ‘financialization’ is often used to describe the major changes that occurred in the macroeconomic regimes of most developed and, to a lesser extent, emerging economies since the beginning of the 1980s. In the present paper, we propose a reappraisal of the notion of the cost of capital and subsequently argue that financialization in France has increased the cost of capital for nonfinancial corporations with new standards of financial profitability. We introduce a measurement for what could be called the over-cost of capital and describe how the evolution of this additional financial burden may explain the slowdown in the pace of capital accumulation, and thus the drop in French macroeconomic performance observed for the past 30 years.