like Walmart, health and pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and UnitedHealth, agribusiness firms like Monsanto, aerospace firms like Boeing, military contracting firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, media corps like TimeWarner and Comcast, and of course software giants like Microsoft and Google. We should be careful not to overstate the case of the dominance of finance. However, it is easy to demonstrate -- as I hope I have done over the course of several essays -- that there has been a secular realignment of forces. The current regime is quite different from the post-war one. A new regime When the interest rates finally went down (1986) and the dollar weakened with the Plaza accord (1985), the rate of profit was finally restored among US manufactures, after having grown only weakly in the recovery from the recession of 1981-82. At this point, it is clear that the political economy equilibrium had shifted irrevocably, for there was no movement to reverse the rise of finance. What had actually transpired was nothing short of a silent revolution marking the birth of financial hegemony. The returns to capital were restored, independent of any acceleration in the underlying productivity and profitability of US firms. The hegemony of finance was only to intensify further and further. Even with the solid revival of the profitability of US manufacturing in 1995 and the tech boom of the late 1990s, finance gained as much as Silicon Valley and US manufacturers and therefore held its ground politically. Following the tech bust