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What Happened to the Bondholding Class? Public Debt, Power and the Top One Per Cent

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  • Sandy Brian Hager
Abstract
In 1887 Henry Carter Adams produced a study demonstrating that the ownership of government bonds was heavily concentrated in the hands of a 'bondholding class' that lent to and, in Adams's view, controlled the government like dominant shareholders control a corporation. The interests of this bondholding class clashed with the interests of the masses, whose burdensome taxes financed the interest payments on government bonds. Since the late nineteenth century there has been plenty of debate about the ownership of the public debt. But the empirical evidence offered to support the various arguments has been scant. As a result, political economists have few answers to questions first raised by Adams over century ago: how has the pattern of public debt ownership changed? Can we still speak of a powerful 'bondholding class'? Does public debt redistribute income from taxpayers to public creditors? This article develops a new framework to address these questions. Anchored within a 'capital as power' approach, the research indicates a staggering pattern of concentration in the ownership of US public debt in the hands of the top one per cent of US households over the past three decades. Accordingly, the bondholding class is still alive and well in contemporary US capitalism.

Suggested Citation

  • Sandy Brian Hager, 2014. "What Happened to the Bondholding Class? Public Debt, Power and the Top One Per Cent," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 19(2), pages 155-182, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cnpexx:v:19:y:2014:i:2:p:155-182
    DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2013.768613
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Goda & Özlem Onaran & Engelbert Stockhammer, 2017. "Income Inequality and Wealth Concentration in the Recent Crisis," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 48(1), pages 3-27, January.
    2. Ewa Karwowski & Marcos Centurion-Vicencio, 2018. "Financialising the state : recent developments in fiscal and monetary policy," Working Papers halshs-01713028, HAL.
    3. Bozena Chovancova & Vladimir Gvozdiak & Zoltan Rozsa & Rahman Ashiqur, 2019. "An Exposure of Commercial Banks in the Terms of an Impact of Government Bondholding with the Context of Its Risks and Implications," Montenegrin Journal of Economics, Economic Laboratory for Transition Research (ELIT), vol. 15(1), pages 173-188.
    4. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Corporate Ownership of the Public Debt: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 13(3), pages 505-523.
    5. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2015. "Public Debt as Corporate Power: Mapping the New Aristocracy of Finance," Working Papers on Capital as Power 2015/01, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism.
    6. Erin Lockwood, 2021. "The international political economy of global inequality," Review of International Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(2), pages 421-445, March.
    7. Carolina Alves, 2023. "Fictitious capital, the credit system, and the particular case of government bonds in Marx," New Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 28(3), pages 398-415, May.
    8. Arbogast, Tobias, 2020. "Who are these bond vigilantes anyway? The political economy of sovereign debt ownership in the eurozone," MPIfG Discussion Paper 20/2, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    9. Goda, Thomas & Onaran, Özlem & Stockhammer, Engelbert, 2014. "A case for redistribution? income inequality and wealth concentration in the recent crisis," Greenwich Papers in Political Economy 14056, University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre.
    10. Shaukat Ansari, 2022. "Cash Transfers, International Finance and Neoliberal Debt Relations: The Case of Post‐apartheid South Africa," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 53(3), pages 551-575, May.
    11. van Bavel, Bas, 2016. "The Invisible Hand?: How Market Economies have Emerged and Declined Since AD 500," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199608133.
    12. Kivisto, Hanna, 2016. "Capital as Power and the Corporatization of Education," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, pages 1-17.
    13. McMahon, James, 2018. "Is Hollywood a Risky Business? A Political Economic Analysis of Risk and Creativity," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Fi, pages 1-24.
    14. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2020. "Varieties of Top Incomes," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 18(4), pages 1175-1198.
    15. Hager, Sandy Brian, 2016. "A Global Bond: Explaining the Safe-Haven Status of US Treasury Securities," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, pages 1-24.
    16. Baines, Joseph, 2015. "Price and Income Dynamics in the Agri-Food System: A Disaggregate Perspective," EconStor Theses, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, number 157992, September.
    17. Baines, Joseph & Hager, Sandy Brian, 2019. "Financial Crisis, Inequality, and Capitalist Diversity: A Critique of the Capital as Power Model of the Stock Market," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, issue Online Fi.
    18. Bichler, Shimshon & Nitzan, Jonathan, 2020. "Growing through Sabotage: Energizing Hierarchical Power," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(5), pages 1-78.
    19. Nitzan, Jonathan & Bichler, Shimshon, 2018. "The CasP Project: Past, Present, Future," Review of Capital as Power, Capital As Power - Toward a New Cosmology of Capitalism, vol. 1(3), pages 1-39.

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