At the end of the twentieth century, while financial economists satisfied their intellectual pretensions to useful knowledge by conjuring up visions of a world peopled with materialistic consumer-investors optimising rationally in accordance with their willingness to hazard their wealth, the propertied classes succumbed to new delusions created by the financial markets. The reasoned response of propertied individuals to their experience of finance has created a new political culture with important consequences for the political economy of capitalism. The propertied classes of the past were a combination of landowners and rentiers, that is, owners of financial securities. The former were oppressed in most progressive countries by death duties and were made even more insecure by the declining real value of rents, that is, the value of rents in relation to the rising cost of maintaining the style and accommodation appropriate to a landowner. In their turn, rentiers had been made insecure by the financial crises and inflation that punctuated the progress of finance from the latter half of the nineteenth century and culminated in the 1929 Crash.

From the 1970s, the growing prosperity of the middle classes in the ‘financially advanced’ countries, such as the United States and Britain, was associated with a switch in their asset holdings, from modest holdings of residential property and direct ownership of stocks and shares, to residential property that was increasing in value and indirect ownership of stocks and shares in the form of funded pension entitlements and insurance policies.