Finance capitalism is the pursuit of profit from the purchase and sale of (investment in) currencies and financial products such as bonds, shares of corporate equity, or futures and other derivatives.

Critics of finance capitalism, in the tradition of Thorstein Veblen, often contrast it with industrial capitalism, where profit is made from the manufacture of goods.

Marxists, and other critics of capitalism as such, see finance capitalism as a dialectical outgrowth of industrial capitalism, and part of the process by which the whole capitalist phase of history comes to an end.

Practitioners of finance capitalism, and academic defenders such as Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, have long regarded this practice as a complement to industrial capitalism, part of the roundabout process by which it grows and hedges against inevitable risks.

Selling short

One financial practice that is often invoked by those who see a conflict between finance and industry is that of the short sales of securities. Managers of industrial companies often allege that short sellers, i.e. stock traders who sell their company's stock before they buy it, implicitly betting on a fall in price, spread untruths about a company's real prospects in order to scare off potential investors, drive down the price, and win that bet.

On their own behalf, though, short sellers allege that they keep corporate management honest, in much the same way that lions weed out the stragglers among a herd of gazelle and so increase the average swiftness of the survivors.